A study on sensor nodes attestation protocol in a Wireless Sensor Network

A sensor network is applied to various fields from the special application fields such as wild environment monitoring, industrial machine measurement, and military-purpose measurement to the daily application fields such as fire monitoring and pollution monitoring. A Wireless Sensor Network is a wire and wireless network, which consists of several sensor nodes deployed in a certain field. A sensor node should have computation, sensing and wireless communication functions. A sensor network has a limited computing and communication resource. To overcome this barrier, collaboration with surrounding nodes is required. In other words, information sharing between hierarchies is required rather than a hierarchical approach. A sensor network generally consists of a large number of sensor nodes for exact sensing and extendibility of the sensing areas. Therefore, attackers can easily capture sensor nodes. And an attacker is able to attack the sensor node itself and the sensor network through a modified attack on sensor nodes. Therefore, the security of a sensor network is important. The attestation for sensor nodes suggested by this paper consists of 2 steps. STEP 1. Inter-connective attestation between surrounding sensor nodes STEP 2. If there is any abnormality, the node notifies the BS (Base Station) and requests attestation as to whether there is a damaged node or not. Initial sensor node attestation is carried out by inter-connective sensor nodes, not by the BS. If there is any abnormality, the node notifies the BS. And BS carries out attestation for node showing abnormality. Attestation for the BS and sensor node uses an authentication protocol method for preventing nodes from being captured. As mentioned above, because there is a periodic simple attestation procedure between sensor nodes and sensor node attestation, it is easy and rapid to identify which is captured by attacker; thus, a secure sensor network is attainable.