A Survey on Wireless Sensor Network Security

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have recently attracted a lot of interest in the research community due their wide range of applications. Due to distributed nature of these networks and their deployment in remote areas, these networks are vulnerable to numerous security threats that can adversely affect their proper functioning. This problem is more critical if the network is deployed for some mission-critical applications such as in a tactical battlefield. Random failure of nodes is also very likely in real-life deployment scenarios. Due to resource constraints in the sensor nodes, traditional security mechanisms with large overhead of computation and communication are infeasible in WSNs. Security in sensor networks is, therefore, a particularly challenging task. This paper discusses the current state of the art in security mechanisms for WSNs. Various types of attacks are discussed and their countermeasures presented. A brief discussion on the future direction of research in WSN security is also included.Comment: 24 pages, 4 figures, 2 table

Key management for wireless sensor network security

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have attracted great attention not only in industry but also in academia due to their enormous application potential and unique security challenges. A typical sensor network can be seen as a combination of a number of low-cost sensor nodes which have very limited computation and communication capability, memory space, and energy supply. The nodes are self-organized into a network to sense or monitor surrounding information in an unattended environment, while the self-organization property makes the networks vulnerable to various attacks.Many cryptographic mechanisms that solve network security problems rely directly on secure and efficient key management making key management a fundamental research topic in the field of WSNs security. Although key management for WSNs has been studied over the last years, the majority of the literature has focused on some assumed vulnerabilities along with corresponding countermeasures. Specific application, which is an important factor in determining the feasibility of the scheme, has been overlooked to a large extent in the existing literature.This thesis is an effort to develop a key management framework and specific schemes for WSNs by which different types of keys can be established and also can be distributed in a self-healing manner; explicit/ implicit authentication can be integrated according to the security requirements of expected applications. The proposed solutions would provide reliable and robust security infrastructure for facilitating secure communications in WSNs.There are five main parts in the thesis. In Part I, we begin with an introduction to the research background, problems definition and overview of existing solutions. From Part II to Part IV, we propose specific solutions, including purely Symmetric Key Cryptography based solutions, purely Public Key Cryptography based solutions, and a hybrid solution. While there is always a trade-off between security and performance, analysis and experimental results prove that each proposed solution can achieve the expected security aims with acceptable overheads for some specific applications. Finally, we recapitulate the main contribution of our work and identify future research directions in Part V

Efficient threshold self-healing key distribution with sponsorization for infrastructureless wireless networks

Self-healing key distribution schemes are particularly useful when there is no network infrastructure or such infrastructure has been destroyed. A self-healing mechanism can allow group users to recover lost session keys and is therefore quite suitable for establishing group keys over an unreliable network, especially for infrastructureless wireless networks, where broadcast messages loss may occur frequently. An efficient threshold self-healing key distribution scheme with favorable properties is proposed in this paper. The distance between two broadcasts used to recover the lost one is alterable according to network conditions. This alterable property can be used to shorten the length of the broadcast messages. The second property is that any more than threshold-value users can sponsor a new user to join the group for the subsequent sessions without any interaction with the group manager. Furthermore, the storage overhead of the self-healing key distribution at each group user is a polynomial over a finite field, which will not increase with the number of sessions. In addition, if a smaller group of users up to a threshold-value were revoked, the personal keys for non-revoked users can be reused

Efficient key management in wireless sensor network security

Wireless sensor network is a multi-hop ad hoc network formed by a large number of low-cost micro-sensor nodes which communicate through radio channels. It is widely used in many areas in modern society and attracts a lot of attention from researchers. This research is on wireless sensor network security and it focuses on key management in hierarchical wireless sensor networks. Through literature review, the drawback and weakness of existing key management schemes are analyzed from various aspects including key establishment, key distribution, key update, authentication and node operation mechanism. Assessment criteria for key management scheme are proposed under different requirements and constraints of wireless sensor networks. The security criteria cover keying model, key distribution, key update, node operation and resilience. For cluster based hierarchical wireless sensor networks, an assistant node is introduced in a cluster to deal with the situation of cluster head compromise and to keep the member nodes securely staying in the network. With introduction of assistant nodes, a complete secure efficient hierarchical key management scheme (SEHKM) for wireless sensor network is proposed. The scheme supports three types of keys and the big improvement over existing key management schemes is on group key update, which is based on pseudo-random numbers and group Diffie-Hellman. The analysis and evaluation have shown that that SEHKM offers strong security with efficient operation from energy consumption point of view

Communication Security in Wireless Sensor Networks

A wireless sensor network (WSN) usually consists of a large number of small, low-cost devices that have limited energy supply, computation, memory, and communication capacities. Recently, WSNs have drawn a lot of attention due to their broad applications in both military and civilian domains. Communication security is essential to the success of WSN applications, especially for those mission-critical applications working in unattended and even hostile environments. However, providing satisfactory security protection in WSNs has ever been a challenging task due to various network & resource constraints and malicious attacks. This motivates the research on communication security for WSNs. This dissertation studies communication security in WSNs with respect to three important aspects. The first study addresses broadcast/multicast security in WSNs. We propose a multi-user broadcast authentication technique, which overcomes the security vulnerability of existing solutions. The proposed scheme guarantees immediate broadcast authentication by employing public key cryptography, and achieves the efficiency through integrating various techniques from different domains. We also address multicast encryption to solve data confidentiality concern for secure multicast. We propose an efficient multicast key management scheme supporting a wide range of multicast semantics, which utilizes the fact that sensors are both routers and end-receivers. The second study addresses data report security in WSNs. We propose a location-aware end-to-end security framework for WSNs, in which secret keys are bound to geographic locations so that the impact of sensor compromise are limited only to their vicinity. The proposed scheme effectively defeats not only bogus data injection attacks but also various DoS attacks. In this study, we also address event boundary detection as a specific case of secure data aggregation in WSNs. We propose a secure and fault-tolerant event boundary detection scheme, which securely detects the boundaries of large spatial events in a localized statistic manner. The third study addresses random key pre-distribution in WSNs. We propose a keyed-hash-chain-based key pool generation technique, which leads to a more efficient key pre-distribution scheme with better security resilience in the case of sensor compromise

Cloud Computing in VANETs: Architecture, Taxonomy, and Challenges

Cloud Computing in VANETs (CC-V) has been investigated into two major themes of research including Vehicular Cloud Computing (VCC) and Vehicle using Cloud (VuC). VCC is the realization of autonomous cloud among vehicles to share their abundant resources. VuC is the efficient usage of conventional cloud by on-road vehicles via a reliable Internet connection. Recently, number of advancements have been made to address the issues and challenges in VCC and VuC. This paper qualitatively reviews CC-V with the emphasis on layered architecture, network component, taxonomy, and future challenges. Specifically, a four-layered architecture for CC-V is proposed including perception, co-ordination, artificial intelligence and smart application layers. Three network component of CC-V namely, vehicle, connection and computation are explored with their cooperative roles. A taxonomy for CC-V is presented considering major themes of research in the area including design of architecture, data dissemination, security, and applications. Related literature on each theme are critically investigated with comparative assessment of recent advances. Finally, some open research challenges are identified as future issues. The challenges are the outcome of the critical and qualitative assessment of literature on CC-V

Security and Privacy Issues in Wireless Mesh Networks: A Survey

This book chapter identifies various security threats in wireless mesh network (WMN). Keeping in mind the critical requirement of security and user privacy in WMNs, this chapter provides a comprehensive overview of various possible attacks on different layers of the communication protocol stack for WMNs and their corresponding defense mechanisms. First, it identifies the security vulnerabilities in the physical, link, network, transport, application layers. Furthermore, various possible attacks on the key management protocols, user authentication and access control protocols, and user privacy preservation protocols are presented. After enumerating various possible attacks, the chapter provides a detailed discussion on various existing security mechanisms and protocols to defend against and wherever possible prevent the possible attacks. Comparative analyses are also presented on the security schemes with regards to the cryptographic schemes used, key management strategies deployed, use of any trusted third party, computation and communication overhead involved etc. The chapter then presents a brief discussion on various trust management approaches for WMNs since trust and reputation-based schemes are increasingly becoming popular for enforcing security in wireless networks. A number of open problems in security and privacy issues for WMNs are subsequently discussed before the chapter is finally concluded.Comment: 62 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables. This chapter is an extension of the author's previous submission in arXiv submission: arXiv:1102.1226. There are some text overlaps with the previous submissio

A Survey on Cryptography Key Management Schemes for Smart Grid

A Smart grid is a modern electricity delivery system. It is an integration of energy systems and other necessary elements including traditional upgrades and new grid technologies with renewable generation and increased consumer storage. It uses information and communication technology (ICT) to operate, monitor and control data between the generation source and the end user. Smart grids have duplex power flow and communication to achieve high efficiency, reliability, environmental, economics, security and safety standards. However, along with unique facilities, smart grids face security challenges such as access control, connectivity, fault tolerance, privacy, and other security issues. Cyber-attacks, in the recent past, on critical infrastructure including smart grids have highlighted security as a major requirement for smart grids. Therefore, cryptography and key management are necessary for smart grids to become secure and realizable. Key management schemes are processes of key organizational frameworks, distribution, generation, refresh and key storage policies. Currently, several secure schemes, related to key management for smart grid have been proposed to achieve end-to-end secure communication. This paper presents a comprehensive survey and discussion on the current state of the key management of smart grids

Lightweight wireless network authentication scheme for constrained oracle sensors

x, 212 leaves : ill. (some col.) ; 29 cmIncludes abstract and appendices.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 136-147).With the significant increase in the dependence of contextual data from constrained IoT, the blockchain has been proposed as a possible solution to address growing concerns from organizations. To address this, the Lightweight Blockchain Authentication for Constrained Sensors (LBACS) scheme was proposed and evaluated using quantitative and qualitative methods. LBACS was designed with constrained Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) in mind and independent of a blockchain implementation. It asserts the authentication and provenance of constrained IoT on the blockchain utilizing a multi-signature approach facilitated by symmetric and asymmetric methods and sufficient considerations for key and certificate registry management. The metrics, threat assessment and comparison to existing WSN authentication schemes conducted asserted the pragmatic use of LBACS to provide authentication, blockchain provenance, integrity, auditable, revocation, weak backward and forward secrecy and universal forgeability. The research has several implications for the ubiquitous use of IoT and growing interest in the blockchain