Lightweight and Secure Data Transmission Scheme Against Malicious Nodes in Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

With the continuous development of sensor technology, more and more users hope to monitor and collect information in a certain area safely and efficiently by deploying heterogeneous wireless sensor networks (HWSNs). However, nodes in HWSNs have limited capabilities, which leads to many security challenges. Existing data transmission schemes in HWSNs take measures to resist these security threats, which aggravate the node computation overhead and increase the network energy consumption. This paper proposes a Lightweight and Secure Data Transmission (LSDT) scheme against malicious nodes in heterogeneous wireless sensor networks. Firstly, considering node capabilities limitations in HWSNs, we design a lightweight secret sharing scheme based on XOR operation, which maps data to multiple shares and makes it convenient to transmit shares separately to the sink node via multiple paths. While guaranteeing data security, this scheme can greatly reduce the computation overhead of nodes compared with traditional secret sharing schemes. Further, during the delivery of shares, the network may be attacked by malicious nodes, causing the interruption of message transmission. Therefore, we design a malicious node detection and feedback mechanism, which can quickly respond to malicious node attacks and update the reputation degree of malicious nodes. Finally, we propose a routing selection scheme based on reference path which comprehensively considers the energy and reputation degree of heterogeneous nodes. It makes message transmission bypass malicious nodes while achieving network energy load balance, significantly extending the network lifetime. The security analysis proves that our scheme guarantees the security of data transmission. Theoretical analysis and experiments show that our scheme has significant advantages over the existing HWSNs data transmission schemes in terms of network lifetime extension and malicious node resistance.