The interleaved authentication for filtering false reports in multipath routing based sensor networks

Abstract

In this paper, we consider filtering false reports in braided multipath routing sensor networks. While multi-path routing provides better resilience to various faults in sensor networks, it has two problems regarding the authentication design. One is that, due to the large number of partially overlapped routing paths between the source and sink nodes, the authentication overhead could be very high if these paths are authenticated individually; the other is that false reports may escape the authentication check through the newly identified node association attack. In this paper we propose enhancements to solve both problems such that secure and efficient authentication can be achieved in multi-path routing. The proposed scheme is (t + 1)-resilient, i.e. it is secure with up to t compromised nodes. The upper bound number of hops that a false report may be forwarded in the network is O(t/sup 2/).