A secure scheme for power exhausting attacks in wireless sensor networks

Security and energy efficiency are the most important concerns in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) design. To save the power and extend the lifetime of WSNs, various media access control (MAC) protocols are proposed. Most traditional security solutions can not be applied in the WSNs due to the limitation of power supply. The well-known security mechanisms usually awake the sensor nodes before the sensor nodes can execute the security processes. However, the Denial-of-Sleep attacks can exhaust the energy of sensor nodes and shorten the lifetime of WSNs rapidly. Therefore, the existing designs of MAC protocol are insufficient to protect the WSNs from Denial-of-Sleep attack in MAC layer. The practical design is to simplify the authenticating process in order to enhance the performance of the MAC protocol in countering the power exhausting attacks. This paper proposes a cross-layer design of secure scheme integrating the MAC protocol. The analyses show that the proposed scheme can counter the replay attack and forge attack in an energy-efficient way.