Interleaved hop-by-hop authentication against false data injection attacks in sensor networks

Sensor networks are often deployed in unattended environments, thus leaving these networks vulnerable to false data injection attacks in which an adversary injects false data into the network with the goal of deceiving the base station or depleting the resources of the relaying nodes. Standard authentication mechanisms cannot prevent this attack if the adversary has compromised one or a small number of sensor nodes. We present three interleaved hop-by-hop authentication schemes that guarantee that the base station can detect injected false data immediately when no more than t nodes are compromised, where t is a system design parameter. Moreover, these schemes enable an intermediate forwarding node to detect and discard false data packets as early as possible. Our performance analysis shows that our scheme is efficient with respect to the security it provides, and it also allows a tradeoff between security and performance. A prototype implementation of our scheme indicates that our scheme is practical and can be deployed on the current generation of sensor nodes.