A lightweight hybrid security framework for wireless sensor networks

On the one hand, intrusion detection systems (IDSs) have shown their ability to detect internal and external attacks with a high accuracy. On the other hand, cryptography techniques have proved their ability to assure the privacy of communication, i.e. data confidentiality. In this paper, we propose to develop and implement a lightweight Security Framework for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) that combines the advantages of both cryptography and IDS techniques to assure the privacy of communication and detect the most dangerous attacks such as spoofed, altered or replayed routing information, man-in-the-middle, and denial-of-service attacks. However, the execution of both techniques at each node generates high overhead and energy consumption, even if we consider a cluster-based WSN. To economize nodes´ energy, the cryptography operation is launched during a certain period determined mathematically and only within the cluster where a malicious node is detected. The proposed framework is evaluated analytically and implemented under TOSSIM simulator. According to our simulation results, our framework outperforms other security frameworks proposed in the literature in terms of detection rate, false positive rate, energy consumption and average efficiency.