Message Authentication Technology In Wireless Sensor Network

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is self-organizing network, which consists of many law-cost, low-power tiny sensors which have computation and storage abilities. Normally, with wireless communication and deployed in unattended region, the transmitted message within WSN can be easily intercepted and tampered. Thus, assuring the integrity and correctness of message is very important.Because of deployed in unattended region usually, sensors are vulnerable to be captured by adversaries. These compromised nodes will be utilized to inject false information into the WSN, which not only causes false alarm but also deplete lots of energy. This paper focuses on how to filter the false data more efficiently and counteract the attack launched by a lot of compromised nodes. The main works in the paper are as follows:1. We analyze the development of message authentication in WSN and put more attention on the Multi-MACs method based on voting which can filter the false data, such as IHA, SEF and LBRS schemes. We also analyses their advantages and disadvantages. Because comparing with other two schemes, SEF is robust against the change of route and destroy of node, can also be applied in the most of scenes and is very simple. Thus, further improving SEF scheme is valuable.2. Combining with clustering structure, we propose first improvement to increase the efficiency of message authentication. When cluster-head nodes receive a message and broadcast it into cluster nodes. These cluster nodes, after receiving the message, verify it at the same time, then feedback the results (right or wrong) to cluster head. Even if one wrong feedback, the cluster head will discard the message. Otherwise continuously transmit it to the next cluster head.3. Because the first improvement still can't counteract the attack launched by lots of comprised nodes. We use the one-way hash chain to compute the authenticating keys and propose the second improvement. With combining hash depth with location of cluster head, the authenticating keys with the same key ID are different. Compared with the first improvement,it can resist the attack from large-scale of compromised nodes.This paper studies the message authentication in wireless sensor network, and focuses on Multi-MACs method based on voting. We propose two improvements on SEF scheme, which make it both have higher authentication efficiency and resist the large-scale compromised attack. Keywords: Wireless sensor networks, Message authentication, False data filtering, Cluster networks...