Secure packet transmission in wireless sensor networks using dynamic routing techniques

Abstract

Due to the unmanned nature of Wireless Sensor Networks security becomes a key criterion when it comes to networks dealing with confidential data Compromised node Denial of Service attacks and Black Holes Sink Holes are the three key types of attacks in Sensor Networks Classic routing algorithms use deterministic multipath routing schemes where a predefined path exits between any two nodes Once if the adversary acquires the routing algorithm it is possible to compute the route making all information sent over these routes vulnerable to its attacks A number of approaches have been proposed for secure routing in wireless sensor networks but there is a lack of sufficient support for quick and secure routing in large scale sensor networks Our proposal aims at improving the security in an ad hoc wireless network Our proposal aims at providing an algorithm that encrypts and decrypts information being passed through the network We consider the dynamic address routing for wireless sensor networks We consider two security algorithms namely Rivest Shamir Adleman Elliptic Curve Cryptography as an initial test for dynamic address routing protocol for wireless sensor networks We consider five routing attacks such as Directory attack Brutal attack Wormhole attack Sinkhole attack and Sybil attack against dynamic address routing in wireless sensor networks We propose a common key cryptographic security algorithm named Random Number Addressing Cryptography for providing energy efficient secure dynamic address routing protocol for scalable wireless sensor networks RAC security algorithm works energy efficiently and provides better security than RSA and ECC A refinement for the RAC algorithm is provided by using concealed data aggregation and randomized dispersive routing Our approach involves the use of a dispersive randomized routing combined with secret sharing scheme that circumvents the black holes formed due to these attacks Since energy efficiency is of paramount importance in a Wireless Sensor Network we employ a data aggregation scheme that reduces that need to transfer huge amounts of data to the base stations Also we apply Privacy Homomorphism based encryption scheme to secure the data during the aggregation process Simulations show that our approach is much more effective in terms of security and energy efficiency compared to their deterministic counterparts This can be further made foolproof by using dynamic routing techniques for transmission of packets Our approach involves selecting intermediary nodes for each packet rather than sending the packets directly to the destination node This way the user initially disperses all the packets that are to be transmitted using a modified form of Backpressure algorithm and then directs them to the destination node using SENCAST By following this method most of the packets that are sent through a network have the probability of escaping black holes Simulations show that our approach is much more effective in terms of security when compared to their deterministic counterparts