Secure anonymous communication for wireless sensor networks based on pairing over elliptic curves

TLDR: Security analysis of the proposed protocol shows that it provides complete anonymity for communicating nodes and is robust against a number of attacks including the masquerade attack, wormhole attack, selective forwarding attack and message manipulation attack.

Abstract: The nature of wireless communication makes it susceptible to a number of security threats, disclosing the identities of the communicating parties in the network. By revealing the identity of nodes in the network, outside parties can setup severe targeted attacks on specific nodes. Such targeted attacks are more harmful to sensor networks as sensing nodes (sensors) have limited computing and communication power prohibiting them from using robust security mechanisms. Anonymous communication is one of the key primitives for ensuring the privacy of communicating parties in a group or network. In this paper, we propose a novel secure anonymous communication protocol based on pairing over elliptic curves for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Using this protocol, only the legitimate nodes in the sensor network can authenticate each other without disclosing their real identities. The proposed protocol is extremely efficient in terms of key storage space and communication overhead. Security analysis of our protocol shows that it provides complete anonymity for communicating nodes. The analysis also shows that the proposed protocol is robust against a number of attacks including the masquerade attack, wormhole attack, selective forwarding attack and message manipulation attack.