Authentication and En-route Data Filtering for Wireless Sensor Networks in the Internet of Things Scenario

To become an indispensable part of the Internet of Things (IoT), wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have to be integrated into the Internet. Under such circumstances, any IP-enabled node in the Internet shall be able to directly communicate with any sensor node in a WSN. Then, multiple sensor nodes can be used to monitor an event and jointly generate a report to be sent to one or more Internet nodes for monitoring purposes. Hence, it becomes imperative that every event report that is transmitted from within the WSN be authenticated to intended Internet users and efficiently filtered on its way to the Internet users. However, most present authentication and en-route data filtering schemes developed for WSNs don’t consider the Internet scenario while traditional mechanisms developed for the Internet can hardly be suitable due to resource constraints of sensor nodes in WSNs. In this paper, we propose an authentication and en-route data filtering scheme for WSNs in the IoT scenario in which signature shares based on the most efficient ID-based signature scheme are generated and distributed by making use of verifiable secret sharing cryptography. Security analysis shows that the proposed scheme can defend against node compromise attacks as well as denial of service (DoS) attacks that cause report disruption and selective forwarding problems. Energy consumption as the result of computation and communication is also analyzed to show the advantages of our scheme compared to some other comparable schemes.