IDSP: A New Identity-Based Security Protocol for Cluster-Based Wireless Sensor Networks

Communication security in Cluster-Based Wireless Sensor Network (CWSN) is considered as a challenging task facing this type of network. The dynamic nature of CWSN and its deployment in open areas making these networks vulnerable to different kinds of cyber-attacks that can adversely affect its own functioning. Moreover, the resource-constrained nature of sensor devices make it impractical to apply conventional security schemes in CWSN, which require high overhead of computation, communication and memory storage. To deal with this issue of communication security, we propose an efficient secure protocol in CWSN called IDentity-based Security Protocol (IDSP), which guarantees secure communication between Cluster Head (CH) and Base Station (BS), as well as communication between CH and Sensor Node (SN). IDSP is based on Identity-Based Cryptography (IBC) that doesn't require Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) or complicated certificate management. The cornerstone of our protocol is to provide a perfect trade-off between three key factors: (i) ensuring a good protection level, especially against various cyber-attacks that may target CWSN, (ii) proposing an efficient process regarding energy consumption and key storage, (iii) introducing a key exchange mechanism in IDSP which is lightweight and uncomplicated. Moreover, our protocol treats public key authentication problem. The proposed protocol is tested in Cooja network simulator with WiSMote platform, and the performance results showed that IDSP is efficient, lightweight and secure.