Publications

Low-bandwidth authentication

Anderson, William E.; Gaines, Brian G.

Remotely-fielded unattended sensor networks generally must operate at very low power--in the milliwatt or microwatt range--and thus have extremely limited communications bandwidth. Such sensors might be asleep most of the time to conserve power, waking only occasionally to transmit a few bits. RFID tags for tracking or material control have similarly tight bandwidth constraints, and emerging nanotechnology devices will be even more limited. Since transmitted data is subject to spoofing, and since sensors might be located in uncontrolled environments vulnerable to physical tampering, the high-consequence data generated by such systems must be protected by cryptographically sound authentication mechanisms; but such mechanisms are often lacking in current sensor networks. One reason for this undesirable situation is that standard authentication methods become impractical or impossible when bandwidth is severely constrained; if messages are small, a standard digital signature or HMAC will be many times larger than the message itself, yet it might be possible to spare only a few extra bits per message for security. Furthermore, the authentication tags themselves are only one part of cryptographic overhead, as key management functions (distributing, changing, and revoking keys) consume still more bandwidth. To address this problem, we have developed algorithms that provide secure authentication while adding very little communication overhead. Such techniques will make it possible to add strong cryptographic guarantees of data integrity to a much wider range of systems.