Implementation and performance analysis of identity-based authentication in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

The use of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in different fields of our life has increased for several recent years. It would be used in applications such as military, human-centric, environmental monitoring, and robotics for remote data collection. Compared to traditional networks, WSNs present more challenges and issues due to their limited energy and bandwidth. This major restriction causes WSNs to be vulnerable under serious security threats, such as Denial of Service (DOS), Jamming, and Man-In-The-Middle (MITM). Until last few years, security solutions for WSNs were concentrated based on symmetric encryption algorithms to prepare authentication since, Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) has fallen from grace due to sensor nodes resource constraints. Despite more efficiency of symmetric cryptography than PKI in terms of energy, symmetric cryptosystems have some drawbacks such as key management. In addition, Public Key Cryptography (PKC) with resource hungry algorithm is not suitable for sensor node authentication. Recent researches on implementation of authentication mechanisms in WSNs show that, still sensor nodes suffer due to lack of a safe, fast, and lightweight authentication technique. This project focuses on secure sensor node authentication using Identity-Based Cryptography (IBC) in WSN. The proposed scheme uses Elliptic Curves Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) with 224 bits key length to present a safe and lightweight authentication in compare to other pairing based algorithms. Additionally, the proposed scheme improves the security level of authentication between sensor nodes. Finally, this project implements and evaluates the proposed scheme using several parameters such as security, time, CPU, and memory requirements to measure the effectiveness of proposed scheme.