Design and development of an enhanced security scheme using RSA for preventing false data injection in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks are largely used in mission-critical applications such as border surveillance, intrusion detection, remote patient monitoring. These applications demand the data to be secured while processing as well as communicating. Data security during the processing phase is a largely researched area, and there exists enough number of techniques to achieve it. On the other hand, techniques to achieve data security during communication phase even though exist in multiple numbers, most of the techniques demand high processing capacity. This requirement leads to high energy consumption which is a challenge in the context of wireless sensor networks. So a technique which will provide data security during communication phase in a wireless sensor network-based application with minimal energy consumption will be a very good solution. The proposed scheme is to prevent false data injection in which malicious or compromised nodes inject false data into the WSN which will influence the decision making of the system. The proposed system provides an enhanced security scheme for preventing false data injection attack in WSN with an efficient reactive routing method. The proposed system addresses two parameters: authenticity of the nodes and the integrity of the data. The proposed system is simulated using Network Simulator 2 (NS2), and the results indicate that the scheme performs better than the existing schemes which provide either integrity of data or authentication of the sender.