Secure Access Control Method for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) contain a large number of resource-constrained and energy-limited sensor nodes that are generally deployed in an open environment. Those sensor nodes communicate with each other or with a base station via wireless channels. Therefore, secure access control is an important issue in WSNs because sensor nodes are susceptible to various malicious attacks during the authentication and key establishment phase and the new node addition phase. In this study, we propose a new access control method based on elliptic curve cryptography and the chameleon hash function. This method addresses the security problems in the existing research. It also has additional advantages since it does not require time synchronization between communication nodes, nor does it require node verification tables. In addition to our proposal, the correctness, security, resistance to possible attacks, and the performance of the proposed method are analyzed and evaluated. The results of our study demonstrate that the proposed method has an outstanding performance and fulfills all the requirements for secure communication in WSNs.