An optimal cryptographic approach for addressing security breaches to build resilient WSN

Abstract

Resilience is the ability of a network to provide and maintain an acceptable level of survivability service though few nodes are compromised. Resilience is one of the critical factors affecting survivability service, especially in unattended wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Security attacks to compromise beacon nodes have become common these days. Messages that are exchanged between the sensor nodes have to be protected by implementing optimal cryptographic approach. At the same time, messages are also must be authenticated. In order to substantially improvise security, considering resilience as a critical factor, we propose an optimal cryptographic approach to generate fully secured data that are exchanged between sensor nodes via shared secret keys generated by the proposed cryptographic design. Researchers in this regard have proposed ample solutions. Since our proposed work is based on symmetric key cryptography and uses feedback shift register mechanism, we claim that the design would be constraint-free in the context of an unattended WSN.