Enhancing S-LEACH security for wireless sensor networks

Developing effective security solutions for wireless sensor networks (WSN) are not easy due to limited resources of WSNs and the hazardous nature of wireless medium. The implementation of encryption/decryption algorithms which are the most essential part of the secure communication can be very intricate in WSNs since they incorporate routines that having very complex and intense computing procedures. A secure clustering protocol that achieves the desired security goals while keeping an acceptable level of energy consumption is a challenging problem in wireless sensor network. LEACH (Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy) protocol is a basic clustering-based routing protocol for WSNs. S-LEACH is the first modified version of LEACH with cryptographic protection against outsider attacks. This paper proposes MS-LEACH to enhance the security of S-LEACH by providing data confidentiality and node to cluster head (CH) authentication using pairwise keys shared between CHs and their cluster members. The security analysis of proposed MS-LEACH shows that it has efficient security properties and achieves all WSN security goals compared to the existing secured solutions of LEACH protocol. A simulation based performance evaluation of MS-LEACH demonstrates the effectiveness of proposed MS-LEACH protocol and shows that the protocol achieves the desired security goals and outperforms other protocols in terms of energy consumption, network lifetime, network throughput and normalized routing load.