μTESLA-based secure routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks are highly prone to security threats due to resource constraints and the broadcast nature of the transmission medium. Directed diffusion protocol is one of the routing protocols for wireless sensor networks that are not designed with security in mind and are particularly susceptible to different security attacks. In this paper, a secure routing protocol for wireless sensor networks, based on the directed diffusion routing algorithm, is presented. The proposed secure routing protocol uses the μTESLA (micro Timed, Efficient, Streaming, Loss-tolerant Authentication) broadcasting authentication algorithm in order to authenticate the acknowledgement messages sent from the sink to the source nodes for confirming the delivery of the data-event messages. A simulation based performance evaluation for the proposed protocol was conducted against black hole and acknowledgement-spoofing attacks. Simulations show that, compared to the original directed diffusion protocol, the proposed secure routing protocol achieved better event-delivery and event-dropping ratios. However, it resulted higher cost in the mean dissipated energy and average delay in some situations due to acknowledgement and authentication processes for delivered events and also due to the retransmissions of non-acknowledged events.