A secure directed diffusion routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

This paper presents a secure routing protocol for wireless sensor networks based on the recognized directed diffusion algorithm. The proposed secure routing protocol uses the μTESLA (micro Timed, Efficient, Streaming, Loss-tolerant Authentication) algorithm in order to authenticate acknowledgement messages sent from the sink to the source nodes for confirming delivery of data-event messages. A simulation based implementation and performance evaluation for the proposed protocol was conducted against black hole and acknowledgement-spoofing attacks. Simulations show that the proposed secure routing protocol achieved better event-delivery and event-dropping ratios compared to the original directed diffusion protocol. However, it resulted higher cost in the mean dissipated energy and average delay in some situations due to acknowledgements and authentication processes for delivered events and also due to the retransmissions of non-acknowledged events.