False Event Message Detection Robust to Burst Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

A sensor device can be used to detect target events at low cost. Moreover, there is a significant risk of sensor nodes being compromised or captured within large wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The transmission of valid event messages to users by a WSN can be hindered by network congestion due to false event messages in a compromised node. Several methods are available for detecting false event messages. However, they rely on long bits of authentication codes and hence do not provide a fundamental solution to prevent network congestion. In the proposed method, various hashing vectors, which are space-efficient data structures that can determine whether the given data are an element of a set, are created based on the correct combination of authentication codes and placed in each node in advance. An event message contains an XOR of the authentication codes, and each node verifies it based on its hashing vector. If a node is acquired illegally, the information of the hashing vector and the XOR information of the authentication codes assigned to the correct event message is compromised, so we propose an algorithm to update the information securely. Compared to existing research, the number of hops required to detect a false event message increases by only about one hop, but the amount of traffic that a malicious node can generate can be reduced by about 60% or more. In other words, the proposed method effectively reduces the amount of traffic an attacker can generate with false event messages, which also reduces the overall network congestion.