Location-Aware Security Services for Wireless Sensor Networks Using Network Coding

Security services such as data confidentiality, authenticity, and availability are critical in wireless sensor networks deployed in adversarial environments. Due to the resource constrains of sensor nodes, the existing protocols currently in use in ad-hoc networks cannot be employed in wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we propose a protocol called location-aware network coding security (LNCS) that provides all the aforementioned security services. By dividing the terrain into non-overlapping cells, the nodes take advantage of the location information to derive different location binding keys. An event in the field is sensed by several nodes and aggregated by all of them. Using a secret sharing algorithm, the aggregated information is divided into several shares that are forwarded toward the sink in a cell-by-cell fashion. The key idea in LNCS is that all the nodes involved in the protocol collaborate in every phase. We employ random network coding in our scheme to provide data availability significantly higher than that in other schemes. To generate authentication information, a hash tree is constructed on the generated packets. The packets that fail the authenticity test are considered as bogus and filtered enroute. Every node transmits only a small fraction of the generated packets along the corresponding authentication information to the next cell. The sink is the final entity being able to reconstruct the original message using a few shares of the message. We have provided a comparison between our scheme and previously proposed schemes. The results reveal significant improvement in data availability while maintaining the same level of data confidentiality and authenticity.