C3SM: Information Assurance Based on Cryptographic Checksum with Clustering Security Management Protocol

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are resource-constrained networks in which sensor nodes operate in an aggressive and uncontrolled environment and interact with sensitive data. Traffic aggregated by sensor nodes is susceptible to attacks and, due to the nature of WSNs, security mechanisms used in wired networks and other types of wireless networks are not suitable for WSNs. In this paper, we propose a mechanism to assure information security against security attacks and particularly node capturing attacks. We propose a cluster security management protocol, called Cryptographic Checksum Clustering Security Management (C3SM), to provide an efficient decentralized security management for hierarchal networks. In C3SM, every cluster selects dynamically and alternately a node as a Cluster Security Manager (CSM) which distributes a periodic shared secrete key for all nodes in the cluster. The cluster head, then, authenticates identity of the nodes and derive a unique pairwise key for each node in the cluster. C3SM provides sufficient security regardless how many nodes are compromised, and achieves high connectivity with low memory cost and low energy consumption. Compared to existing protocols, our protocol provides stronger resilience against node capture with lower key storage overhead.