A Privacy-Preserving Reauthentication Scheme for Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

The mobile wireless sensor network (MWSN) is a new style WSN with mobile sinks or sensors in the network. MWSN has advantages over static WSN in the aspect of better energy efficiency, improved coverage, and superior channel capacity. However, mobile nodes also bring some security problems. For example, it is difficult to ensure secure communications among the mobile nodes and static nodes. In this paper, we design a lightweight mobile reauthentication protocol for mobile nodes. The designed protocol provides forward secure pairwise key for the mobile node when it moves from one cluster to another. Thus, the mobile sensor node can be authenticated by the new cluster head, and the privacy of his origin area is protected. In addition, the security and performance analysis shows that our scheme meets the need of lower communication and computation overhead, while achieving security requirement for mobile sensor node application in MWSN.