Lightweight Secure Detection Service for Malicious Attacks in WSN With Timestamp-Based MAC

Abstract

Sensors in wireless sensor network (WSN) are usually deployed in the wild or even hostile circumstance. What is worse, most of the sensors have limited communication bandwidth, computation resources and energy. Therefore, it is challenging to ensure the security of WSN without decreasing its network performance. Network coding (NC) is a promising way for improving communication capability in WSN, e.g., high throughput, robustness and low-energy. Nevertheless, network coding is vulnerable to malicious attacks. Presently, many secure detections, such as information theoretic-based or cryptographic-based techniques, have been proposed to deal with a single type of attack, but are incapable of resisting the joint attacks, e.g., the union of pollution attacks and replay attacks. In this paper, a secure detection service is presented. It is deployed on every node of WSN to monitor, manage and control the messages passing through them in real-time. In the service, a lightweight timestamp-based message authentication code, namely TMAC, is designed with Exclusive OR network coding. Based on TMAC and time synchronization technique, a joint detection is implemented to resist pollution attacks and replay attacks synchronously. The correctness of the detection service is proved. Finally, the performance evaluation shows that the detection scheme brings negligible extra-expense in communication bandwidth and computational complexity compared to MAC-based schemes, and consumes energy lowly compared to other joint detection schemes.