Authentication and Anti-replay Security Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks are used in domains such as medical monitoring, homeland security, industrial automation and military applications, therefore it is very critical to protect the network against malicious attacks. This paper presents a new security protocol that provides conversation authentication, integrity, intrusion prevention and anti-replay protection. The protocol uses two methods in order to meet these requirements: the last MAC method and an authentication handshake. The protocol has been implemented in TinyOS in two layers of the communication stack: the MAC and Authentication layer. The MAC layer is the implementation of the last MAC method and the Authentication layer generates and verifies the four messages exchanged during the authentication handshake. Authentication and Anti-replay Security Protocol has been tested with TOSSIM in various attack scenarios and has proved that it is able to reject malicious attempts to communicate with the network nodes.