Three-Tier Security Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

This article describes a three-tier general framework that permits the use of any pairwise key predistribution scheme as its basic component. The new framework requires two separate key pools, one for the mobile sink to access the network, and one for pairwise key establishment between the sensors. To further reduce the damages caused by stationary access node replication attacks, we have strengthened the authentication mechanism between the sensor and the stationary access node in the proposed framework. Through detailed analysis, we show that our security framework has a higher network resilience to a mobile sink replication attack as compared to the polynomial pool-based scheme.