Node Legitimacy Based False Data Filtering Scheme in Wireless Sensor Networks

False data injection attack is a serious threat to wireless sensor network. In this paper, a node legitimacy based false data filtering scheme (NLFS) is proposed. NLFS verifies not only message authentication codes (MACs) contains in reports, but also the legitimacy of nodes that endorse the report. The verification guarantees that compromised nodes from different geographical areas cannot collude to inject false data, which makes NLFS has a high tolerance of compromised nodes. In addition, NLFA only utilizes the relationships between node IDs to verify the legitimacy of nodes without other software or hardware overhead. Simulation results show that NLFS can filter 95% false reports within three hops and is resilience to an increasing number of compromised nodes.