Secure Routing in Cluster-Based Wireless Sensor Networks

One of the most important source of WSN vulnerability is the forwarding process between the nodes. In fact, routing protocols are often based on clustering principle, where a set of clusters represented by a Cluster Head (CH) for each cluster, is conceived to rely fundamentally data packets between the network nodes. These protocols are vulnerable to several attacks affecting different routing processes such as hello flooding, selective forwarding, replay process. These attacks are more damaging if the CH is corrupted by a malicious node playing CH role. This paper proposes a new secure protocol based on the well-known LEACH routing protocol named Hybrid Cryptography-Based Scheme for secure data communication in cluster-based WSN (HCBS). As a multi-constrained criteria approach, HCBS is built on a combination of the cryptography technique based on Elliptic Curves to exchange keys that uses symmetric keys for data encryption and MAC operations. After a set of tests on TOSSIM simulator, the results obtained showed that our proposal achieves good performances in terms of energy consumption, loss rate and end-to-end delay. In addition, HCBS guaranties a high level of security.