A Lightweight Authentication Framework for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is emerging as a dominant technology with its applications in areas like agriculture,
communication, environment monitoring, and surveillance. The inherited vulnerability and resource-constrained nature of sensor nodes led researchers to propose many lightweight cryptographic protocols for WSN. These sensors are low-cost, low energy, have low processing capability and have low storage restrictions. WSN suffers from many risks because of these unique constraints. This paper proposes a new lightweight security framework for WSNs and covers different lightweight cryptographic schemes for WSN applications. The aim is to provide cryptographic primitives for integrity, confidentiality, and protection from the man-in-the-middle and reply attacks. The work is based solely on symmetric cryptography and it has four phases; Network Initialization, Node Initialization, Nodes Communication, and Node Authentication. This work adopts the Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) framework, which deploys random rotation to distribute the energy among a group of nodes. The probability of attacking in LEACH is higher at cluster head and member nodes. Therefore, data transmission among communicated nodes is encrypted over multiple levels of protection by dynamic session keys to provide a high level of security. In addition, an authentication ticket
is provided by a cluster head for each authenticated node to identify another node. The session keys are dynamically generated and updated during the communication to prevent compromising or capturing the keys. Through simulation and evaluation of the system, the results showed less energy consumption and efficient cryptographic primitive were compared with existing schemes.