Defense against outside attacks in wireless sensor networks

Networking unattended wireless sensors have significant impact on both military and non-military applications. Efficiency of wireless sensor network (WSN) depends on the correctness of the information those have been collected. At the same time, security is most important to prevent outsiders (i.e. illegitimate party) from retrieving the correct information. This paper proposes a user authentication mechanism to countermeasure the outside attacks. The salient feature of the proposed technique is that it establishes threshold number of session keys simultaneously between the user and individual sensor nodes during a single authentication process without using the public key cryptography. The proposed scheme therefore, reduces the computational complexity on one hand and enhances the security aspects on the other.