A lightweight PUF-based secure group key agreement protocol for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have gained considerable popularity in a wide range of applications such as military, healthcare, transportations, and environmental sensing. Data produced in these applications is highly sensitive and requires a high level of security protection. However, individual nodes in WSNs are typically resource constrained and have limited computing power to protect memory stored secrets, which are vulnerable to tampering and physical probing. As group messaging is commonly used in WSNs for efficient message exchanges among sensor nodes, this paper presents a lightweight secure group key agreement protocol using Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) as a hardware root of trust. The proposed scheme establishes secure group authentication and group session key simultaneously for all participating members of the group without resorting to complex public-key algorithms. By hiding the prover's authentication secrets in a secure mask, the verifier does not have to store the secrets but recover them for authentication by querying its PUF. The proposed protocol enables lightweight cluster head authentication at the sensor node and prevents stolen-verifier attack at the cluster head. Besides, it is robust against memory probing attacks at all group devices and man-in-the-middle attacks on the communication channel. Among existing PUF-based group key establishment protocols, it requires zero secret storage cost and exhibits excellent overall computation and communication performance.