Data authenticity and availability in multihop wireless sensor networks

Security services such as data confidentiality, authenticity, and availability are critical in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) deployed in adversarial environments. Due to the resource constrain's of sensor nodes, the existing protocols currently in use in adhoc networks cannot be employed in WSNs. In this article, we propose a protocol called location-aware network-coding security (LNCS) that provides all the aforementioned security services. By dividing the terrain into nonoverlapping cells, the nodes take advantage of the location information to derive different location-binding keys. The key idea in LNCS is that all the nodes involved in the protocol collaborate in every phase. We employ random network coding in order to provide data availability significantly higher than that in other schemes. A hash tree-based authentication mechanism is utilized to filter the bogus packets enroute. We provide a comparison between our scheme and previously proposed schemes. The results reveal significant improvement in data availability while maintaining the same level of data confidentiality and authenticity.