(A) study on a secure clustering scheme in wireless sensor network

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is considered to be as one of the fundamental technologies for building ubiquitous computing environment. Since WSN consists of many sensor nodes with limited resources (i.e., computation, storage and battery), security primitives can be hard to be implemented. Thus, the network can be vulnerable to various attacks (i.e., denial-of-service attack, sinkhole/wormhole/sybil attack, message forgery attack, etc.). HPEQ (Hierarchical Periodic, Event-driven and Query-based) protocol was purposed for surveillance of emergency events. In this routing protocol, clustering method is originated from LEACH, which is one of the most cited researches for cluster-based WSN. However, not only inherent vulnerabilities exist in HPEQ protocol, due to no provision of security requirements such as confidentiality, integrity of data packets, authentication of sensor nodes, etc., but also new vulnerabilities may occur, by the modification of aggregator selection from LEACH. Several secure variants of LEACH such as SecLEACH, GS-LEACH, etc. were suggested. However, these schemes still have some vulnerabilities. Therefore, we present a secure clustering scheme guaranteeing authentication of sensor nodes that are members of a cluster and confidentiality of communication data and the cluster topology.