Sec-TMP: A secure Topology Maintenance protocol for event delivery enforcement in WSN

Topology Maintenance in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), that is, alternating duty cycles with sleep cycles while having an adequate number of nodes monitoring the environment, is a necessary requirement to allow the WSNs to move from niche applications to widespread adoption; topology maintenance is even mandatory when the WSNs are used in a security sensitive context. In this work, we present the first scalable Secure Topology Maintenance Protocol (Sec-TMP) for Wireless Sensor Networks that does not require pair-wise node confidentiality. The aim of Sec-TMP is to enforce event delivery to the BS while providing a standard topology maintenance service to the WSN. Sec-TMP enjoys the following features: it does not require pair-wise node confidentiality; it does not need any underlying routing - just one-hop communications are used; and, it is highly scalable. Sec-TMP reaches its goal being also resilient to the known attacks on TMPs: snooze attack; sleep deprivation attack; and, network substitution attack. Furthermore, Sec-TMP confines node replication attack: once a node is captured, the protocol limits the possible usage of the corresponding node's ID to a single neighbourhood. Finally, extensive simulations support our findings.© Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2010.