A plan-commit-prove protocol for secure verification of traversal path

Security is an important issue in wireless sensor networks. With the growing scope of ad-hoc wireless sensor networks, many of its applications require more than just data authentication. The sensor nodes that receive data from other sensor nodes not only need to authenticate the data but also need to trust the associated information. In particular, in this paper we discuss the problem when a mobile node sends data as well as its location information to the static sensor nodes deployed randomly over a two dimensional area. It could be seen, that, a simple data authentication mechanism cannot ensure that the mobile node always provides the correct location information and it does not cheat about the location or the path it has taken for movement. In this paper we provide a "plan-commit-prove" protocol for secure verification of location and traversal path claim and analyze the security aspects of the protocol. The mobile node generates a movement plan and broadcasts a commitment to some neighboring nodes; at a later point in time static nodes verify the planed movement claims of the mobile node by sampling the commitments at various points on the path.