Enhancing Base Station Security in Wireless Sensor Networks ; CU-CS-951-03

Wireless sensor networks that are deployed in applications such as battlefield monitoring and home sentry systems face acute security concerns, including eavesdropping, forgery of sensor data, denial of service attacks, and the physical compromise of sensor nodes. Sensor networks are often organized hierarchically, with a base station serving as a gateway for collecting data from a multi-hop network of resourceconstrained sensor nodes. Prior work that has focused on securing the routing between sensor nodes has assumed that the base station is sufficiently powerful to defend itself against security threats. This paper considers strategies for securing the sensor network against a variety of threats that can lead to the failure of the base station, which represents a central point of failure. First, multipath routing to multiple destination base stations is analyzed as a strategy to provide tolerance against individual base station attacks and/or compromise. Second, confusion of address and identification fields in packet headers via hashing functions is explored as a technique to help disguise the location of the base station from eavesdroppers. Third, relocation of the base station in the network topology is studied as a means of enhancing resiliency and mitigating the scope of damage.