Secure pairwise broadcast time synchronization in wireless sensor networks

Most wireless sensor network (WSN) applications require a synchronized local clock in sensor nodes. One promising approach to achieve time synchronization in WSN, with significantly reduced energy consumption, is the Receiver-Only synchronization approach. However, to the best of our knowledge, there has been no previous published work addressing the security issue of this approach. So, our contribution consists in proposing a secure version for this approach. We show that our scheme is resilient to various attacks, namely sybil attacks, message manipulation attacks, replay attacks, delay attacks, wormhole attacks, and misleading attacks. These security features are achieved by the use of public key cryptography-based authentication scheme, random nonce, and threshold-based delay attack detection.