SECURE BROADCAST COMMUNICATION IN SENSOR NETWORKS: FORTIFYING THE KD AUTHENTICATION PROTOCOL

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are self-organizing networks composed of sensor nodes deployed in potentially hostile environments, making them highly susceptible to various security threats. Among these, Broadcast Service Attacks pose significant risks by injecting invalid packets through compromised nodes, leading to excessive power consumption, memory overload, bandwidth variation, and disruption of reliable data aggregation. Ensuring secure broadcast authentication in WSNs is a critical and complex challenge. This research focuses on mitigating Broadcast Service Attacks using the Kurosawa-Desmedt (KD) authentication scheme. The proposed approach is evaluated and compared against the Feige-Fiat-Shamir (FFS) security algorithm using the NS-2 simulator. Simulation results demonstrate that the KD algorithm outperforms the FFS approach in terms of Packet Delivery Ratio, End-to-End Delay, Detection Accuracy, and Average Energy Consumption. The practical applicability and benefits of the proposed method are also briefly discussed. Furthermore, the application of this work has been discussed briefly in this paper.