Design of a Secure Communication Scheme using Channel Shifting in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

One of the primary challenges to wireless sensor network is to satisfy the security needs of application since it is not practical to recover quickly once the network has been compromised. In order to improve the resilience of the network against wormhole attacks, a security scheme for wireless sensor network (WSN) has been proposed. The proposed scheme hybrids polynomial pool based key pre-distribution scheme and the availability of multiple channels on every sensor node. It allows the sensor nodes not only to establish a secure link with any other sensor node using polynomial pool-based key pre-distribution scheme but also to avoid wormhole attack by shifting from the common channel to any randomly selected channel from its available channels, and hence drifting from the frequency at which adversary is assumed to be listening to launch a wormhole attack. Results show that when almost fifty percent of neighbouring sensor nodes is malicious, the probability of wormhole attack is almost zero.