PKC-Based DoS Attacks-Resistant Scheme in Wireless Sensor Networks

Public-key cryptography (PKC) operations are heavy to resource-constrained sensor nodes. Therefore, attackers can cripple a sensor node by forcing it to perform a large number of false PKC operations. In this letter, we propose a fully distributed and effective scheme that randomly drops extra PKC request messages beyond its processing capability. Our scheme is not only resistant to PKC-based denial-of-service attacks, but also energy-efficient.