Agent Based Secure Data Collection in Heterogeneous Sensor Networks

Efficient data collection is challenging in Wireless Sensor Networks. Use of Mobile Agents for various operations like data collection and software updates in Wireless Sensor Networks is receiving significant attention recently as it increases the lifetime of the network. Mobile Agents are privileged hence they are attractive targets. Compromised mobile agents may be used to launch various attacks in turn may compromise the entire network. Also an adversary may deploy some malicious nodes which act as mobile agents. In order to provide security for the network in this paper we are proposing a simple authentication scheme for heterogeneous sensor network which uses mobile agents for efficient data collection. The proposed scheme is used to identify malicious nodes acting as mobile agents. Also we are achieving confidentiality of the data collected using simple key derivation technique which allows a cluster head to encrypt the data every time using a different key which can be easily derived by the base station.