A Lightweight Secure and Energy-Aware Protocol with Trust-Based Attack Detection for Wireless Sensor Networks (SENAD)

Abstract

A lot of important systems now depend on Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) because they focus on secure and energy-efficient ways to send data. At the same time, these networks face problems such as limited energy and vulnerability to security attacks, such as injecting false information and compromising network nodes. This work introduces a Lightweight Secure and Energy-Aware Protocol with Trust-Based Attack Detection (SENAD) for wireless sensor networks. The proposed protocol deploys a trust management system to detect malicious nodes, dynamic selection of cluster heads with lightweight SHA-256-based authentication, and energy-aware multi-hop communication to reduce energy consumption. SENAD helps keep data secure, speeds up attack detection, and reduces power consumption by adapting how it sends data to the base station. Simulation results confirm that SENAD improves network lifetime, data delivery, and attack detection compared with TAGA and TESRP. SENAD provides a useful security method for WSNs that will need to operate with limited energy in the future.