Authentication and Hybrid Security in Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

Security in communication network is the major threat in passing data among the nodes of a Wireless Sensor Network. Establishing an efficient key management in wireless sensor networks (WSN) and providing authentication to the nodes is a great challenge with reference to the constrained energy, memory, and computational capabilities of the sensor nodes. Previous researches on network security mainly considered homogeneous sensor networks with symmetric key cryptography. Recent researchers advanced to asymmetric key cryptography in heterogeneous sensor networks (HSN) that can improve network performance. The merits and demerits of symmetric and asymmetric cryptography were studied in combination with authentication methods, and thus proposing Authentication and Hybrid Security in Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks .Tickets are used by the cluster heads to communicate to base stations, public key encryption method based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) to communicate between H and L sensor nodes while using a hash function between adjacent nodes in the same cluster. The combined authenticated and key management method provides better security with minimum communication and computation cost based on analysis and simulation.

Keywords: symmetric key cryptography, asymmetric key cryptography, homogeneous sensor networks, heterogeneous sensor networks, authentication, hash function, ECC