A Hybrid Cryptographic and Token-based Framework to Mitigate Denial-of-sleep Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) tend to be very weak against energy-draining attacks such as DoSL attacks where sensor motes are forced to stay awake, their batteries quickly draining and causing networks to cease functioning. Existing mitigation techniques usually address the cryptographic authentication or energy-aware routing or energy management at the MAC layer, however, none of them combines three layers and provides holistic protection. This paper proposes a novel hybrid security framework combining the use of token-based admission control, RSA-interlock authentication handshake and S-MAC duty-cycled sleep scheduling to effectively limit the number of unauthorized requests, prevent tampering of the authentication handshake and protect the sleep cycles of nodes from adversarial interference. The proposed model is intended to work in well-resourced nodes but severely constrained nodes while providing the stack layering of defense. A coherent=-workflow, control-packet sequence and a lightweight mathematical model are developed models to quantify energy savings, authentication-cost and resilience, under the simulated DoSL situation. Comparative analysis with recent methods: ASDA-RSA, WSN-FAHN, DSD-RSA, hybrid methods, token only shows that the proposed hybrid framework provides considerably enhanced energy conservation, packet delivery ratio, and network lifetime. The approach provides a viable way for modern secure WSN deployments for smart environments, precision agriculture, border surveillance and industrial IoT.