LoENA: Low-overhead Encryption based Node Authentication in WSN

Nodes in a wireless sensor network (WSN) are susceptible to various attacks primarily due to their nature of deployment and unguarded communication. Therefore, providing security in such networks is of utmost importance. The main challenge to achieve this is to make the security solution light weight so that it is feasible to implement in such resource constrained nodes in WSN. So far, data authentication has drawn more attention than the node authentication in WSN. A robust security solution for such networks must also facilitate node authentication. In this paper, a low overhead encryption based security solution is proposed for node authentication. The proposed node authentication scheme at the sender side consists of three modules viz. dynamic key generation, encryption and embedding of key hint. Performance of the scheme is primarily analyzed by using two suitably chosen parameters such as cracking probability and cracking time. This evaluation guides us in fixing the size of the unique id of a node so that the scheme incurs low-overhead as well as achieves acceptable robustness. The performance is also compared with a couple of recent works in terms of computation and communication overheads and that confirms our scheme's supremacy over competing schemes in terms of both the metrics.