Efficient selection method of message authentication codes for filtering scheme in sensor networks

In spite of technological advances, wireless sensor networks have some security problems when deployed in the real world. The statistical en-route filtering (SEF) scheme was proposed to detect and drop fabricated reports. In the SEF, a representative node makes an event report by using the received message authentication code (MAC) from each event-sensing node. If the representative node receives enough MAC from event-sensing nodes, that node randomly selects an MAC from the received MACs as many as the threshold. If the forwarding nodes do not have the same key as the randomly selected MACs, they cannot verify whether an event report is correct or not. To enhance the detection power, we propose the associated MAC determining method by using partition information of the forwarding nodes. The simulation results show that the proposed method is more efficient than the randomly selected method.