Abstract
Data authentication is an important component of secure wireless sensor network (WSN). Message Authentication Code (MAC) is employed frequently to provide data authentication. In data authentication, there is a tradeoff between transmission cost and the ability to detect error data. In the previous literatures, only one of them will be optimized. However, no matter which one we consider, the design and practicality of applications in WSN will be limited. In view of this, we develop a new flexible data authentication scheme to balance between them by improving the XOR MAC scheme and using the concept of error correcting code. Our scheme not only provides a higher error detection rate than the Combination MAC Method (CMM), but also requires substantially less transmission cost than Pairwise MAC Method (PMM). The new proposed scheme, FXMM, meets the requirements of applications. In this study, we develop the FXMM (k, 1) and FXMM (k, 2) to detect one and two fault messages. In addition, a proposed search algorithm to help construct FXMM, which detects multiple errors. Moreover, we propose an adaptive error-detecting framework that combines the advantages of CMM, PMM, and our scheme. Finally, a performance evaluation and security analysis for our framework is provided at the end of the research.