Authentication of the Message through Hop-by-Hop and Secure the Source Nodes in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Message authentication is the most effective way to protect the data from unauthorized access and corrupted messages being forwarded in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). For this reason, many message authentication schemes have been developed, based on either symmetric-key cryptosystems or public-key cryptosystems. Some have the limitations of high computational and communication overhead and lack of scalability to node compromise attacks. To address these issues, a polynomial-based scheme was recently introduced. However, this scheme and its extensions all have the weakness of a built-in threshold determined by the degree of the polynomial when the number of messages transmitted is larger than this threshold, the adversary can fully recover the polynomial. While enabling intermediate nodes authentication, the proposed scheme allows any node to transmit an unlimited number of messages without suffering the threshold problem. In addition VGuard Security framework is used provide source privacy in the network. Both theoretical analysis and simulation results demonstrate that our proposed scheme is more efficient than the polynomial-based approach in terms of computational and communication overhead for various comparable security levels while providing message source privacy.