A Secure Routing and Aggregation Protocol with Low Energy Cost for Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are increasingly deployed in security-critical areas, such as battle field. However, general sensor nodes are manufactured with inexpensive components, and they are short of security enhancement. Therefore, an adversary could capture and compromise sensor nodes easily, then launch some malicious attacks (including tampering or discarding useful data collected from source nodes). In this paper, we propose a secure routing and aggregation protocol with low energy cost for sensor networks (named STAPLE), which utilizes one-way hash chain and multi-path mechanism to achieve security of wireless sensor networks, and develop a network expanding model to control communication cost incurred by multi-path routing. We perform the simulation of STAPLE in comparison with INSENS, the results demonstrate that STAPLE achieves a higher level security and it is efficient in large scale sensor networks with considerably low communication overhead.

I. Introduction

Wireless sensor networks offer economically solutions for various applications, and they are increasingly deployed in security-critical areas [1], such as battle field. Wireless sensor networks must not only report each event promptly, but also reject false reports and tampered data packets. However, sensor nodes are not made tamper-proof due to cost constraints. Therefore, sensor nodes containing the keys or communication protocols, could be captured and analyzed easily [2] [3] [4] after deployment. Then they may be forged and put back into sensor networks without being noticed. Finally, the adversary may launch a variety of attacks [5] [6], such as selective forward data and tamper data. Further more, wireless sensor nodes are powered by batteries, so they only have limited energy capacity [7], and the computation and communication cost should be strictly controlled. These circumstances pose critical challenges to protocol designers.