Neighborhood-based security protocol for wireless sensor networks

The main objective of this work is to minimize the intrusion attacks without causing a significant impact on energy consumption. One of the proposed methods was the neighborhood-based key agreement protocol (NEKAP). It could provide an authentication in a wireless sensor network. Unfortunately, adversaries may launch a replay attack though the loophole of NEKAP to successfully masquerade legitimate nodes and thereby compromise the communications over the network. In this paper, we present a modified security protocol for wireless sensor networks. Similarly to NEKAP, we design and provide four types of keys for each node, which adapt to different security requirements. The descriptions on the proposed protocol in conjunction to the conventional NEKAP are provided; and the improvement on the performance is also discussed and analyzed on several, typical attacks found in wireless sensor networks, i.e., replay attack and DoS attack. The study on our new security protocol shows that it can enhance the security resilience for the wireless sensor network better than the conversional method.