PIR-based data integrity verification method in sensor network

Since a sensor node handles wireless communication in data transmission and reception and is installed in poor environment, it is easily exposed to certain attacks such as data transformation and sniffing. Therefore, it is necessary to verify data integrity to properly respond to an adversary’s ill-intentioned data modification. In sensor network environment, the data integrity verification method verifies the final data only, requesting multiple communications. An energy-efficient private information retrieval (PIR)-based data integrity verification method is proposed. Because the proposed method verifies the integrity of data between parent and child nodes, it is more efficient than the existing method which verifies data integrity after receiving data from the entire network or in a cluster. Since the number of messages for verification is reduced, in addition, energy could be used more efficiently. Lastly, the excellence of the proposed method is verified through performance evaluation.