Implementing Data Security in Wireless Sensor Networks through Location Aware Multifunctional Key Management Framework

Abstract

As wireless sensor network"s (WSN"s) consists of large number of nodes which are deployed in unattended/hostile environments and are exposed to different types of attacks due to compromisation of node or group of nodes. Usually, security designs provide a hop-by-hop security paradigm and are vulnerable to many types of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, such as report disruption and selective forwarding, puts data availability at stake. In this paper, we overcome these vulnerabilities for large-scale static WSN"s by using Location aware multifunctional key management framework. Sensors will be deployed in some area in a grid type model and knows its position based on X and Y coordinates in the grid. Further, embed the location information of each sensor into few of its secret keys which are owned by that sensor node and location-aware property effectively limits the impact of compromised nodes only to their vicinity without affecting end-to-end data security. This framework assures both node-to-sink and node-to-node authentication along the report forwarding routes and demonstrates that this design is highly resilient against an increasing number of compromised nodes and effective in energy savings by avoiding DoS attacks.