Novel Design of Secure End-to-End Routing Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, the secure end-to-end data communication is needed to collect data from source to destination. Collected data are transmitted in a path consisting of connected links. All existing end-to-end routing protocols propose solutions in which each link uses a pairwise shared key to protect data. In this paper, we propose a novel design of secure end-to-end data communication. We adopt a newly published group key pre-distribution scheme in our design, such that there is a unique group key, called path key, to protect data transmitted in the entire routing path. Specifically, instead of using multiple pairwise shared keys to repeatedly perform encryption and decryption over every link, our proposed scheme uses a unique end-to-end path key to protect data transmitted over the path. Our protocol can authenticate sensors to establish the path and to establish the path key. The main advantage using our protocol is to reduce the time needed to process data by intermediate sensors. Moreover, our proposed authentication scheme has complexity O(n), where n is the number of sensors in a communication path, which is different from all existing authentication schemes which are one-to-one authentications with complexity O(n2). The security of the protocol is computationally secure.