Energy-Efficient Security Threshold Determination Method for the Enhancement of Interleaved Hop-By-Hop Authentication

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks allow attackers to inject false reports by compromising sensor nodes due to the use of wireless communication, the limited energy resources of the sensor nodes, and deployment in an open environment. The forwarding of false reports causes false alarms at the Base Station and consumes the energy of the sensor nodes unnecessarily. As a defense against false report injection attacks, interleaved hop-by-hop authentication was proposed. In interleaved hop-by-hop authentication, the security threshold is a design parameter that influences the number of Message Authentication Codes; the sensor nodes must verify, based on the security requirements of the application and the node density of the network. However, interleaved hop-by-hop authentication fails to defend against false report injection attacks when the number of compromised sensor nodes exceeds the security threshold. To solve this problem, in this paper we propose a security scheme that adjusts the security threshold according to the network situation using an evaluation function. The proposed scheme minimizes the energy consumption of the sensor nodes and reinforces security.