Light Weight WSN Authentication Protocol Suite

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consists of low cost, light weight, low processing power, shrinked life sensor nodes known as motes with an ability to communicate with each other over short ranges. The network formed out of sensor motes is controlled by a Base Station which has far more processing power and life as compared to sensor nodes. As WSNs are used for many practical purposes including matters related to na-tional security, it becomes imperative to ensure that the underlying communication is secured. However, the scarcity of resources in a sensor mote makes it highly challenging to ensure secured communication and long life of a sensor network at the same time. Several protocols have been proposed for authentication mechanisms in WSNs but most of them either are weak or have resulted in large energy expenditure. We through this paper have proposed a light weight protocol suite which has tried to cover almost all the authentication requirements of WSN. The proposed authentication protocol suite has been made light weighted by using symmetric encryption/decryption in most of the situations and the security has been made comparable to that of asymmetric encryption/decryption by introducing randomization in symmetric cryp-tosystem. We have proposed protocols for node authentication, broadcast authentication, data transfer and network monitoring using a combination of public key and symmetric cryptography. Previous works have been used for the calculation and comparison of energy expenditures in detail.