Intrusion Resilient Secure Topology Construction in Unstructured Wireless Sensor Network

An Unstructured Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a self-configuring network of sensor nodes connected by wireless links to form an arbitrary topology without the use of existing infrastructure to monitor a region or to obtain data about the environment. The topology of the network is an important parameter which is required by the base station to address routing, localization, pair wise key establishment etc. Since the nodes are deployed in an adhoc manner into the field consisting of hundreds or thousands of nodes, their topology is not known to the base station. Also once deployed, the network is left unattended to perform monitoring and reporting functions. In many sensor network applications like battlefield an adversary may be motivated to disrupt the functioning of whole network by positioning several intruder nodes. We present a secure topology construction protocol which includes only the legitimate nodes and it can be launched any time by the base station for knowing the network graph for alive nodes. Since security does not comes free, it imposes extra burden on resource deprived nodes, therefore we establish lightweight security solution using μTESLA and secure key pre distribution.