Network Security Management in Wireless Networks through 3-Round Zero Knowledge Proof

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) will provide an excellent opportunity to control environments. Even WSNs have lot of applications, some of them quite sensitive in nature and require full proof secured environment. The wireless security mechanism is not same as in wired networks. Because there is no user-controlling for each individual node, wireless environment, and more importantly, scarce energy resources. In this paper, we propose the 3-round zero knowledge protocol for main problem in sensor network security is that sensors are compromised once; the adversary can easily launch clone attacks by replicating the compromised node, distributing the clones throughout the network, and starting a variety of insider attacks. Previous works against clone attacks suffer from either a high communication/storage overhead or poor detection accuracy. Here, we propose a novel scheme for detecting clone attacks in sensor networks, which computes for each sensor a social fingerprint by extracting the neighbourhood characteristics and verifies the legitimacy of the originator for each message by checking the enclosed fingerprint. The fingerprint generation is based on the superimposed s-disjunct code, which incurs a very light communication and computation overhead. The fingerprint verification is conducted at both the base station and the neighbouring sensors, which ensures a high detection probability. The security and performance analysis indicate that our algorithm can identify clone attacks with a high detection probability at the cost of a low computation/communication/storage overhead. To our best knowledge, our scheme is the first to provide real-time detection of clone attacks in an effective and efficient way.