SecAT-Dist: A Novel Secure AT-Dist Localization Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

In the last few years, the localization issue in wireless sensor networks has gained a lot of popularity for providing flexible and novel location-aware applications. However, throughout the variety of research works in this topic, most interests focused purely on the localization scheme itself rather than the security issue of the localization. In this paper, we propose a new and original secure version of AT-Dist, a distance-based multihop localization algorithm previously explored but under a non-adversarial environment. This version, called SecAT-Dist, proposes a lightweight security scheme that combines RC4-based hash function and symmetric encryption system to enable sensor nodes to authenticate received beacon location information and protects hop-count information from being arbitrary or selfishly changed. Furthermore, we introduce a trust model based on a set of confidence index taking benefits from specific characteristics of distance-based multihop localization algorithms. Analytically, we show that the number of trust anchors, among the total number including malicious anchors, is reduced. Simulation results show that our security scheme is more resistant to external attacks and allows great number of nodes to be located with accuracy.