Provisioning Authentication On Demand in Wireless Sensor Networks: PAW

Impersonation and node compromise are common attacks on wireless sensor networks. In these attacks, the attacker gains access to a node or pretends to be some legitimate node of the network, injects and modifies messages, putting the network security at stake. To combat these attacks, authentication mechanism can be employed to ensure that data is not altered during transit and its sourced from a legitimate node. Any wireless sensor network application without authentication but encompassing other security measures are incomplete and insignificant. The authentication techniques proposed for traditional computer networks are based on certificates - issued and validated by a third party and another method is based on symmetric key cryptography that requires very high communications. Due to resource constraints of the wireless sensor networks, the authentication should be light weight along with other security features such as scalability and reduced consumption of resources. In this paper, a new security service to thwart unauthorized access into the network through PAW: Provisioning authentication on demand in Wireless Sensor Networks scheme is proposed. The PAW scheme is relatively more secure than the existing schemes and has reduced communication overhead.