The TESLA Broadcast Authentication Protocol

 

A viable broadcast authentication protocol has the following requirements:

• Low computation overhead for generation and verification of authentication information.
• Low communication overhead.
• Limited buffering required for the sender and the receiver, hence timely authentication for each individual packet.
• Robustness to packet loss.
• Scales to a large number of receivers.

The TESLA protocol meets all these requirements with low cost -- and it has the following special requirements:

• The sender and the receivers must be at least loosely time-synchronized as outlined in Section 2.2.
• Either the receiver or the sender must buffer some messages.

Despite the buffering, TESLA has a low authentication delay. In typical configurations, the authentication delay is on the order of one round-trip delay between the sender and receiver.

 
• Sketch of TESLA protocol
• Sender Setup
• Bootstrapping Receivers
• Broadcasting Authenticated Messages
• Authentication at Receiver