Secure Time Synchronization for Wireless Sensor Networks Based on Bilinear Pairing Functions

Time synchronization is crucial for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and secure time synchronization is a key requirement for many sophisticated applications running on these networks. Most of the existing secure time synchronization protocols incur high communication and storage costs, and are subject to a few known security attacks. In this paper, we propose a novel secure time synchronization protocol for both homogeneous and heterogeneous WSN models; the protocol uses pairing-based cryptography to secure the time synchronization and to reduce the communication and storage requirements of each node. Security analysis of the protocol shows that it is highly robust against different attacks, namely selective forwarding attack, wormhole attack, masquerade attack, message manipulation attack, replay attack and delay attack.

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