SERCID: A secure mechanism for data collection in wireless sensor networks

The unattended nature of wireless sensor networks makes them very vulnerable to malicious attacks. An adversary can physically compromise a subset of sensor nodes in a wireless sensor network to eavesdrop information. Due to some intrinsic features of wireless sensor network, it is difficult to perform efficient intrusion detection against malicious nodes in such a resource-restricted environment. In this paper, we propose a novel secure mechanism, SERCID for wireless sensor networks. The mechanism consists of a key-based secure routing algorithm and a counter-based intrusion detection algorithm. The approach is able to protect the data collection in a wireless sensor network even if there are malicious nodes in the network. The major contribution of our work is that we present an original approach to defend wireless sensor networks against both tampering and packet-dropping attacks, for the first time. We provide a relatively simple but reliable approach to support secure data collection in wireless sensor networks. Compared with existing research efforts, the proposed approach is easy to be implemented and performed in resourceconstrained wireless sensor networks.