Fuzzy efficient MAC length determination method for commutative cipher based filtering

Wireless Sensor Networks are vulnerable to false data injection attack, because they are often deployed in a hostile environment. Adversaries may attempt various security attacks on sensor networks through a compromised node, with the goal of deceiving the sink node or depleting the limited energy resources of nodes. The commutative cipher based en-route filtering scheme (CCEF) was proposed to detect and drop such false reports during the forwarding process. In this scheme, the number of message authentication codes (MAC) is important to detect false reports and save energy in the sensor network. In this paper, we propose a fuzzy efficient MAC length determination method for CCEF, in which the MAC length is adaptively determined by a fuzzy rule based system. The distance from the sink node to the cluster head (CH), the false traffic rate, and energy level are used to determine the MAC length through a fuzzy rule based system. We show the proposed method can save energy and provide sufficient resilience against false data injection attack.