Enhancing security using digital signature in an efficient Network Coding-enabled WSN

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are ad hoc networks composed mainly of tiny and resource-constrained sensor nodes, and are rapidly growing as a technology for low-cost, large-scale and automated systems to sense and monitor a different range of potential environments. Network Coding (NC) technique has been proposed for these networks for various reasons such as improving the throughput and enhancing the energy efficiency for routing protocols. Meanwhile, these networks remain prone to many types of attacks that damage the safety and reliability of data routing. One type of attack is the Man In The Middle (MITM) attack, where an external node injects false data packet in the network or forges an intercepted one circulating between two legitimate nodes. The objective of the work is to eliminate false data packets reception at the base station (BS) and to provide data integrity using a digital signature scheme. The main advantage is the integration of the signature scheme in a moderated NC-based protocol and the use of already deployed node parameters to create private keys for sensor nodes. Simultaneously, the protocol exploits the hierarchical network organization and sets a cooperation between nodes in a cluster and their cluster head (CH) to minimize energy depletion.