Public Key-Based Authentication and En-Route Filtering Scheme in Wireless Sensor Networks

The existing public key-based en-route filtering schemes are vulnerable to report disruption attacks or selective forwarding attacks, and they fail to consider any measure to detect and punish the malicious nodes. The authors propose a series of public key-based security mechanisms for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in this paper, including a mechanism for verifying the partial signatures, a substitution mechanism, an effective report forwarding protocol, and a trust value-based mechanism to identify and punish the malicious nodes. Finally, the authors develop a public key-based authentication and en-route filtering scheme (PKAEF), which can resist false data injection attacks, report disruption attacks and selective forwarding attacks, and can mitigate the impact of malicious nodes. Detailed performance analysis and evaluation show that, in most cases, PKAEF outperforms previous works in terms of safety, filtering efficiency, and data availability.