Pseudo-Random Encryption for Security Data Transmission in Wireless Sensor Networks

The security of wireless sensor networks (WSN) has become a great challenge due to the transmission of sensor data through an open and wireless network with limited resources. In the paper, we discussed a lightweight security scheme to protect the confidentiality of data transmission between sensors and an ally fusion center (AFC) over insecure links. For the typical security problem of WSN’s binary hypothesis testing of a target’s state, sensors were divided into flipping and non-flipping groups according to the outputs of a pseudo-random function which was held by sensors and the AFC. Then in order to prevent an enemy fusion center (EFC) from eavesdropping, the binary outputs from the flipping group were intentionally flipped to hinder the EFC’s data fusion. Accordingly, the AFC performed inverse flipping to recover the flipped data before data fusion. We extended the scheme to a more common scenario with multiple scales of sensor quantification and candidate states. The underlying idea was that the sensor measurements were randomly mapped to other quantification scales using a mapping matrix, which ensured that as long as the EFC was not aware of the matrix, it could not distract any useful information from the captured data, while the AFC could appropriately perform data fusion based on the inverse mapping of the sensor outputs.