Design of Authentication Protocol for LR-WPAN using Pre-Authentication Mechanism

This paper proposes a new authentication protocol for the LR-WPAN. In order to guarantee the reliability and safety of a protocol, this protocol uses the hierarchical authentication. In addition, in order to reduce the impact of the denial of service attack, the proposed protocol performs the authentication between a parent router and a joiner device prior to the authentication between a trust center and the joiner device. Moreover, this protocol reduces the authentication delay by decreasing the number of message exchanges during authentication. We evaluate the safety of the proposed protocol by the security analysis and compare the number of message exchanges of the ZigBee authentication protocol and the proposed protocol when denial of service attack occurs. We also analyze the delay for authentication of the joiner device through the implementation of both protocols. Those results show that the proposed protocol effectively protects networks from the denial of service attack and reduces the time for authenticating the joiner device up to maximum 30% as the number of hops increases.