International Journal of Engineering and Technology

Providing security service in wireless sensor networks using authentication techniques turns out to be a non-trivial task due to network resource constraints. To improve the network security it is often necessary to combine intrusion detection techniques with the key management protocols. Several symmetric key cryptographic solutions proposed earlier are inefficient against node compromise attacks due to complicated key management and delay in the disclosure of secret keys. On the other hand, conventional public key cryptographic techniques have simple and clean key management but suffer from large key size introducing more communication overhead, computational time and delayed authentication. This paper presents E-MultiSEC, a highly reliable authentication technique based on ElGamal signature scheme to provide an efficient secured environment against node compromise attacks in wireless sensor networks. Any compromised node is detected and isolated in the initial stage itself with minimum overheads and energy consumption. The best and fresh route is formed using intermediate nodes between the source and the sink. In addition, this scheme exploits the use of only one ElGamal signature to authenticate the messages which in turn reduces the overhead of the sink in key generation and performing signature verification. A modification of an existing data authentication technique using signatures with hash-chaining is presented, and the modified technique is compared to the original scheme. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme is more advantageous in terms of authentication delay, computation overhead, packet loss, throughput and key generation by sink. The proposed scheme is also more resilient to node compromise attacks and can be applied for different routing techniques in a sensor network.