An efficient and reliable two-level lightweight authentication protocol

In this paper we propose a new lightweight authentication protocol. It is a two-level protocol which supports unbounded message transmission. It is suitable for several settings, from the standard sender-receiver setting to unreliable broadcast and multicast communication in networks with resource-constrained devices. The key ideas underlying our design are the use of the Guy Fawkes signatures, the hash-chaining method, and some techniques used in MAC-based authentication protocols for multicast communication. To our knowledge, our protocol is the first one that solves the unbounded number of message transmission issue in unreliable settings. It does not lose efficiency and introduces only a constant-size overhead in message transmission compared to solutions for a bounded number of message transmissions.