Hill Climbing Key Dissemination Approach in Wireless Sensor Networks

We consider routing security for filtering adversaries in wireless sensor networks. Many sensor network routing protocols have been proposed, but none of them have been designed with security as a goal in wireless sensor networks. In wireless sensor networks offer unprecedented capabilities to monitor the physical world by reporting the occurrence of interested events. Unfortunately, such WSN are vulnerable to event fabrication attacks, in which the compromised nodes inject bogus reports into the network, fabricating non-existent events “appearing” at arbitrary locations. Most existing routing security solutions to these attacks need to share symmetric keys among sensor nodes. In this paper, we propose a Hill Climbing Dissemination Approach in Wireless Sensor Networks (HCD) that drops fabricated reports en-route without symmetric key sharing. In HCD, the source node establishes a secret association with the base station on a per-session basis, while the intermediate forwarding nodes are equipped with a witness key. Through the usage of a hill climbing and hash chain, a forwarding node can use the witness key to verify the authenticity of the reports without knowing the original session key using MAC. As a result, HCD can achieve stronger security protection than the existing symmetric key sharing approach in wireless sensor networks.