Layer 2 Packet Authentication for IoT Sensor Networks

Abstract

With the advance of IoT (Internet of Things), the amount of sensor data transmitted on wireless sensor networks (WSNs) around us are increasing tremendously thanks to rapid growth of various IoT applications. Such sensor data are vulnerable to security threats if not secured by proper security measures built upon WSN protocols. One of the most important security measures is data authentication for transmitted data. Naturally there have been a lot of works on authentication of WSN packets through transmission channel, including IEEE 802.11i which defines the security features of the wireless LAN. However, most of such works have limited their authentication scope on data packets. Although some works propose authentication for packets other than data packets, they usually require an extension of the existing packet format such as IEEE 802.11, or they make use of its undefined fields, and thus they will introduce the risk of interoperability problems with existing networks. This paper proposes a novel packet authentication method for Layer 2 networks which addresses the above two issues. The proposed method is applicable to not only data packets but also other types of packets, and it does not require modification of the standard packet format. It employs a packet's FCS (Frame Check Sequence) field for both authentication and frame error detection and it can be safely introduced to existing WSNs.