A Fuzzy Rule-Based Key Redistribution Method for Improving Security in Wireless Sensor Networks

Jae Kwan LEE  Tae Ho CHO  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications   Vol.E101-B   No.2   pp.489-499
Publication Date: 2018/02/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1345
DOI: 10.1587/transcom.2017EBP3191
Type of Manuscript: PAPER
Category: Fundamental Theories for Communications
Keyword: 
wireless sensor networks,  false report,  false vote,  probabilistic voting-based filtering scheme,  fuzzy logic system,  network security,  

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Summary: 
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are randomly deployed in a hostile environment and left unattended. These networks are composed of small auto mouse sensor devices which can monitor target information and send it to the Base Station (BS) for action. The sensor nodes can easily be compromised by an adversary and the compromised nodes can be used to inject false vote or false report attacks. To counter these two kinds of attacks, the Probabilistic Voting-based Filtering Scheme (PVFS) was proposed by Li and Wu, which consists of three phases; 1) Key Initialization and assignment, 2) Report generation, and 3) En-route filtering. This scheme can be a successful countermeasure against these attacks, however, when one or more nodes are compromised, the re-distribution of keys is not handled. Therefore, after a sensor node or Cluster Head (CH) is compromised, the detection power and effectiveness of PVFS is reduced. This also results in adverse effects on the sensor network's lifetime. In this paper, we propose a Fuzzy Rule-based Key Redistribution Method (FRKM) to address the limitations of the PVFS. The experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method by improving the detection power by up to 13.75% when the key-redistribution period is not fixed. Moreover, the proposed method achieves an energy improvement of up to 9.2% over PVFS.