Chained Identity Attestation (CIA) method in preventing node impersonation attack in wireless sensor network / Norhaflyza Marbukhari

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) system incorporates a gateway that provides wireless connectivity back to the wired environment and distributed nodes. The nature of the sensor nodes that are located remotely and unattended has exposed itself to node impersonation attack. This kind of attack can be further classified into physical and active attack where the nodes identity are being copied or stolen and in worst case scenario, it can be removed from their locations and duplicated in the lab. Several node identity authentication methods have been developed and proposed by few researchers to overcome or mitigate their problem. However, with the nature of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) nodes that are left unattended, the problem still exits. This work presents new method in mitigating node impersonation attack. This method is called Chained Identity Attestation (CIA). The main objective of this project is to mitigate node impersonation attack in WSN environment, in term of identity cloning. A test bed consisting of two sensor nodes and a base station is set up to verify and analyse its feasibility in a real environment using mathematical analysis, the developed protocol is proven to overcome node cloning or node impersonation attack. Successful authentication between sensor nodes and base station are reported to confirm the functionality of the proposed new method. Feasibility of the proposed method in term of processing time and energy consumption is presented and compared with the original DHKE method. The results prove the security and feasibility of the developed protocol.