Secure Routing for WSN-Based Tactical-Level Intelligent Transportation Systems

Wireless sensor network (WSN) is gaining popularity in recent years due to the advantages of the WSN such as mobility, flexibility and low power consumption. Therefore, the usage of WSN in tactical-level Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) is expected to be able to overcome restrictions that the conventional ITS can only detect the vehicle in fixed position and high cost of construction and maintenance. Thanks to highly dynamic nodes to forward the network packets to the destinations, WSN is particularly vulnerable to attacks of interception and flooding, forging and tampering packets. Accordingly, reliable communication between nodes is dependent on the mechanism to verify the network traffic authenticity and communicating peers identity. In this paper, we propose a Zero Knowledge Key Exchange (ZKKE) scheme to setup a lightweight and adaptive hop to hop zero knowledge authentication chain (ZKAC). We adopt the GNY cryptographic protocol to prove the correctness of ZKKE and ZKAC. Based on computational cheap hash function and public-key scheme without trust third party (TTP), ZKAC enables hop-to-hop as well as end-to-end integrity protection for both routing and transformation informations in the WSN-based tactical-level ITS.