OPSENET: A Security-Enabled Routing Scheme for a System of Optical Sensor Networks

In this paper we introduce OPSENET, a novel and efficient protocol that facilitates secure routing in directional optical sensor networks. We show that even though the uni- directionality of links in an optical sensor network (OSN) complicates the design of efficient routing, link directionality actually helps security in our network setup. In particular, we leverage the naturally-occurring clustering that results from passive (bi-directional) communication of select cluster head nodes with the base station, to improve overall network performance. This paper presents two main contributions: (1) We introduce OPSENET, a novel secure cluster-based routing algorithm for base station circuit discovery in OSNs. In order to support the efficient utilization of a nodes' resources, we employ symmetric cryptography in the design of OPSENET, using efficient oneway hash functions and pre-deployed keying. OPSENET achieves base station broadcast authentication, per-hop authentication, and cluster group secrecy, without requiring any time synchronization. (2) We analyze the relevance of traditional routing attacks on OSNs, and show that OPSENET is robust against uncoordinated (non-smart) insider routing attacks, amongst other compromises. An important performance metric of OPSENET is its low byte overhead, and graceful degradation with the number of compromised nodes in the network. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to consider secure routing in an OSN network scenario.