Energy efficient method for detection and prevention of false reports in wireless sensor networks

In a wireless sensor network, various attacks such as the false injection attack, easily occur by malicious attackers. This attack drains the finite energy resources of each node to destroy functions of the sensor network. SEF (statistical en-route filtering scheme) was proposed to probabilistically detect the false reports in intermediate nodes while forwarding processes. In this paper, we propose a security method which uses three types of keys and a black list to prepare a countermeasure against the false report injection attack. Three types of keys are used in each node - an individual key for encrypting event information between a node and a base station, a pairwise key for maintaining secure routing paths between the intermediate nodes, and a cluster key for detecting forged MACs between the neighboring nodes of a cluster region. A center-of-stimulus node prevents forged MACs through the black list while they consistently occur from the compromised node. SEF is evaluated with the proposed method, for efficient energy consumption of each node. The experiment results show that our proposed method enhances energy savings more compared to the SEF in the sensor network.