A Lightweight Authentication Framework for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

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.