A Review on Lightweight Node Authentication Algorithms in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor nodes are prone to several critical attacks due to the distributed placement of sensor nodes in unattended environments. Sensor nodes are the core part of the WSN therefore, securing these sensor nodes are the utmost important task. Without security, sensor nodes are easily compromised by the attacker and then the attacker get the access to the sensor networks, which result in the total degradation of the WSN. Therefore, an authentication mechanism is needed to check the genuineness of sensor node in the network, before communication actually takes place. The main challenge in WSN security is to design an authentication algorithm that is lightweight because sensor nodes have low energy and low memory. Many works have so far been discussed towards securing WSN in terms of lightweight node authentication algorithms. This paper, presented the various lightweight node authentication algorithms in WSN. Also, their performance is compared in terms of communication overhead, computational overhead, memory overhead & security level.