Towards Provable Security for Data Transmission Protocols in Sensor Network

This paper presents a framework to analyze the security of data transmission protocols in wireless sensor network. This framework defines three attack models in terms of the adversary’s attacking ability, and provides an ideal model to verify whether a given protocol is secure or not under these three different attack models. Furthermore, we give a formal security definition under different attack models for data transmission protocols. A security checking model is also presented, which describes the detailed steps of how to use the security definition to weigh the security level of a given protocol in the ideal model. A “secure” directed diffusion protocol is analyzed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the security checking model. This is the first time that the notion of provable security is applied in wireless sensor networks.