Location-Based Pairwise Key Establishment and Data Authentication for Wireless Sensor Networks

Sensor networks are often deployed in unattended environment, thus leaving those networks vulnerable to false data injection attacks. Attackers often inject false data into the network in order to deceive the base station or deplete the resource and the energy of the relaying nodes. The existing authentication mechanisms cannot prevent this kind of attack after an amount of sensor nodes have been compromised. Pairwise key establishment is a fundamental security in wireless sensor networks, which makes it possible that sensor nodes can communicate securely one another using cryptographic techniques. However, the limited resource and energy of sensor nodes are not feasible to use such traditional key management techniques as public/private cryptography and key distribution center (KDC). In this paper, we present a novel key management and data authentication technique that pass sensing data securely and filter false data out on its way to base station. The framework of our design is to divide sensing area into a number of location cells and a group of local cells consist of a logical cell, where, pairwise key between two sensor nodes is established according to the grid-based bivariate polynomials. The established pairwise key is included in the message authentication code (MAC) and is forwarded several hops down to the base station for data authentication. Our result shows that this location scheme and data authentication method decreases communication overhead, avoids t-tolerance, and filters bogus report in wireless sensor networks