Selective Authentication Based Geographic Opportunistic Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks for Internet of Things Against DoS Attacks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been widely used as the communication system in the Internet of Things (IoT). In addition to the services provided by WSNs, many IoT-based applications require reliable data delivery over unstable wireless links. To guarantee reliable data delivery, existing works exploit geographic opportunistic routing with multiple candidate forwarders in WSNs. However, these approaches suffer from serious Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, where a large number of invalid data are deliberately delivered to receivers to disrupt the normal operations of WSNs. In this paper, we propose a selective authentication-based geographic opportunistic routing (SelGOR) to defend against the DoS attacks, meeting the requirements of authenticity and reliability in WSNs. By analyzing statistic state information (SSI) of wireless links, SelGOR leverages an SSI-based trust model to improve the efficiency of data delivery. Unlike previous opportunistic routing protocols, SelGOR ensures data integrity by developing an entropy-based selective authentication algorithm, and is able to isolate DoS attackers and reduce the computational cost. Specifically, we design a distributed cooperative verification scheme to accelerate the isolation of attackers. This scheme also makes SelGOR avoid duplicate data transmission and redundant signature verification resulting from opportunistic routing. The extensive simulations show that SelGOR provides reliable and authentic data delivery, while it only consumes 50% of the computational cost compared to other related solutions.