Adaptive Confidentiality Mechanism for Hierarchical Wireless Sensor Networks

Protocol designs in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have to consider many constraints such as limited power and computing capacity. We propose an end-to-end adaptive confidentiality mechanism (ACM), which significantly reduces the risk of adversary capturing aggregated messages leaving a cluster head while meeting these rigid resource constraints. ACM divides an encrypted message into several segments and sends them to a pre-defined super node set. The super nodes encrypt and forward the segments to a super node set leader which, then decrypts and reconstructs the original message. Analysis shows that ACM improves data confidentiality by several magnitudes without adding significant communication and processing overhead.