Security and energy efficiency are critical concerns in wireless sensor network (WSN) design. This paper aims to develop an energy-efficient secure scheme against power exhausting attacks, especially the denial-of-sleep attacks, which can shorten the lifetime of WSNs rapidly. Although various media access control (MAC) protocols have been proposed to save the power and extend the lifetime of WSNs, the existing designs of MAC protocol are insufficient to protect the WSNs from denial-of-sleep attacks in MAC layer. This is attributed to the fact that the well-known security mechanisms usually awake the sensor nodes before these nodes are allowed to execute the security processes. Therefore, the practical design is to simplify the authenticating process in order to reduce the energy consumption of sensor nodes and enhance the performance of the MAC protocol in countering the power exhausting attacks. This paper proposes a cross-layer design of secure scheme integrating the MAC protocol. The analyses show that the proposed scheme can counter the replay attack and forge attack in an energy-efficient way. The detailed analysis of energy distribution shows a reasonable decision rule of coordination between energy conservation and security requirements for WSNs.
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