HySecNJoining: A hybrid secure node joining algorithm for wireless sensor network

Abstract

A wireless sensor network consists of several sensor nodes strewn over a large geographic area and base station. Depending upon the routing model used data collected by the sensor node are routed through several hops of the network to the base station. Before a new node becomes operational the base station verifies its authenticity for security reasons. We call this phase as secure joining of a node. The process of secure joining can be as simple as allowing a new node to join by simply verifying its MAC-ID in plain text. However, this simple secure joining is prone to many attacks and therefore, not acceptable to many organizations requiring high grade of security. On the other hand stringent process of secure joining such as multi-level verification of authentication credentials in a secure channel comes with a cost in terms of energy consumption. In this paper we propose a stringent secure joining method which uses the concept of certificate less PKI and symmetric key and goes through multi-level authentication for prevention of flooding attack.