Energy Conserving Security Mechanism for Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

This paper describes Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) security to conserve wasteful energy. Sensor networks are emerging fast and will be the next wave towards new network appliances. Security must be justified and ensured before the large scale deployment of sensors as individual sensors are prone to security compromise. In the sensor field, an adversary can compromise sensor nodes that can be used to generate random false sensing data. As these generated packets propagate through the network towards final data acquisition point, it will result in the energy consumption in a constrained low powered network. As WSN is multi-hop communication in nature, node-to-node authentication using shared secret is important for legitimate data packets to be forwarded. In this paper, we develop a security mechanism to detect energy-consuming useless data flows that propagate through network. Assuming that a sensor node can sense an event and generates multiple Message Authentication Code (MAC) using secret keys and these MACs are appended to the sensed data. The forwarding nodes along the path towards the data acquisition point verify the validity of the sensed data by checking the authenticity of the MACs attached to the original sensed data. Intuitively, early detection of the false data will make the entire network energy conserving which is one of the primary goals in the design of sensor networks. We have quantified the security strength through analysis and simulation.