A Security Framework for Replication Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Mobile sinks play a great role in many Wireless Sensor Network applications for efficient data accumulation, localized sensor reprogramming and for collecting data from various sensor nodes across the globe. However, in sensor networks that make use of the existing three tier security framework, elevates a new security challenge i.e an attacker can easily create a replicated node and can gain control of the data in the network. Although the three-tier security framework is more resilient to mobile sink replication attacks, it is weak against access point replication attacks. To reduce the damage caused by access node replication attack, strengthening the authentication mechanism between the sensors and access nodes is vital. For this purpose, the single polynomial pool is converted to a double polynomial pool for providing security over the existing system. Also, security is increased by separating the access points into two layers namely, access nodes-D and access nodes-I along with a more secure authentication mechanism called WHIRLPOOL that produces a 512 bit encrypted text using Miyaguchi-Preneel scheme of cipher text generation.Our proposed algorithm ensures the necessary security mechanism for Wireless Sensor Networks and also does not degrade the performance of quality of service.