A dynamic en-route filtering scheme for data reporting in wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks, adversaries can inject false data reports via compromised nodes and launch DoS attacks against legitimate reports. Recently, a number of filtering schemes against false reports have been proposed. However, they either lack strong filtering capacity or cannot support highly dynamic sensor networks very well. Moreover, few of them can deal with DoS attacks simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a dynamic en-route filtering scheme that addresses both false report injection and DoS attacks in wireless sensor networks. In our scheme, each node has a hash chain of authentication keys used to endorse reports; meanwhile, a legitimate report should be authenticated by a certain number of nodes. First, each node disseminates its key to forwarding nodes. Then, after sending reports, the sending nodes disclose their keys, allowing the forwarding nodes to verify their reports. We design the Hill Climbing key dissemination approach that ensures the nodes closer to data sources have stronger filtering capacity. Moreover, we exploit the broadcast property of wireless communication to defeat DoS attacks and adopt multipath routing to deal with the topology changes of sensor networks. Simulation results show that compared to existing solutions, our scheme can drop false reports earlier with a lower memory requirement, especially in highly dynamic sensor networks.