A lightweight security and privacy-aware routing scheme for energy-constraint multi-hop wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Unique constraints associated with wireless sensor networks notably, limited resources and physical exposure of sensor nodes have warranted the need for a lightweight and low energy demand security mechanisms for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Most of the existing security schemes demand computational power beyond the computational capacity of WSNs making them unsuitable security schemes for WSNs' routing protocols. In this work, a lightweight security and privacy scheme for WSNs' routing protocol is developed. An elliptic curve cryptography, scalar blinding, symmetric encryption, and modified Diffie Hellman key exchange protocol are adopted to evolve an additive perturbation that ensures data integrity, and an effective authentication that ensure confidentiality during routing. The security analysis shows that the scheme is secured against possible known attacks and performs better than some of the considered state-of-the-art schemes used in WSNs. Both the analytical and experimental results not only show that the proposed scheme requires lower computational power but with increase level of security and speed.