A symmetric key based secured data gathering protocol for WSN

Wireless sensor network (WSN) is usually used in civil and military applications for gathering data from the surrounding environment. As WSN is a self configured network and mostly works in an unattended wireless environment, there is a lot of scope for the adversaries to tamper the sensed data as well as may try to alter the underlying working principle of the network. Several factors like, physical exposure of the sensor nodes to the adversaries, the ad-hoc network infrastructure etc. makes WSN more prone to security threats. Providing security solution to the WSN is again a difficult task due to inherent constraints associated with the sensor nodes like, limited processing power, smaller memory and fixed battery power. Security solutions based on public key cryptography are not usually recommended for WSN because of comparatively more computational cost. In this paper we have analyzed different security threats associated with the energy efficient data gathering protocol HCEPSN and proposed a symmetric key based security solution to it.