SDTP+: Securing a distributed transport protocol for WSNs using Merkle trees and Hash chains

Transport protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are designed to fulfill both reliability and energy efficiency requirements. Distributed Transport for Sensor Networks (DTSN) [1] is one of the most promising transport protocols designed for WSNs because of its effectiveness; however, it does not address any security issues, hence it is vulnerable to many attacks. The first secure transport protocol for WSN was the secure distributed transport protocol (SDTP) [2], which is a security extension of DTSN. Unfortunately, it turns out that the security methods provided by SDTP are not sufficient; some tricky attacks get around the protection mechanism. In this paper, we describe the security gaps in the SDTP protocol, and we introduce SDTP⁺ for patching the weaknesses. We show that SDTP⁺ resists attacks on reliability and energy efficiency of the protocol, and also present an overhead analysis for showing its effectiveness.