An Energy Aware and Secure MAC Protocol for Tackling Denial of Sleep Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks which form part of the core for the Internet of Things consist of resource constrained sensors that are usually powered by batteries. Therefore, careful energy awareness is essential when working with these devices. Indeed,the introduction of security techniques such as authentication and encryption, to ensure confidentiality and integrity of data, can place higher energy load on the sensors. However, the absence of security protection c ould give room for energy drain attacks such as denial of sleep attacks which have a higher negative impact on the life span ( of the sensors than the presence of security features. This thesis, therefore, focuses on tackling denial of sleep attacks from two perspectives A security perspective and an energy efficiency perspective. The security perspective involves evaluating and ranking a number of security based techniques to curbing denial of sleep attacks. The energy efficiency perspective, on the other hand, involves exploring duty cycling and simulating three Media Access Control ( protocols Sensor MAC, Timeout MAC andTunableMAC under different network sizes and measuring different parameters such as the Received Signal Strength RSSI) and Link Quality Indicator ( Transmit power, throughput and energy efficiency Duty cycling happens to be one of the major techniques for conserving energy in wireless sensor networks and this research aims to answer questions with regards to the effect of duty cycles on the energy efficiency as well as the throughput of three duty cycle protocols Sensor MAC ( Timeout MAC ( and TunableMAC in addition to creating a novel MAC protocol that is also more resilient to denial of sleep a ttacks than existing protocols. The main contributions to knowledge from this thesis are the developed framework used for evaluation of existing denial of sleep attack solutions and the algorithms which fuel the other contribution to knowledge a newly developed protocol tested on the Castalia Simulator on the OMNET++ platform. The new protocol has been compared with existing protocols and has been found to have significant improvement in energy efficiency and also better resilience to denial of sleep at tacks Part of this research has been published Two conference publications in IEEE Explore and one workshop paper

The Meeting of Acquaintances: A Cost-efficient Authentication Scheme for Light-weight Objects with Transient Trust Level and Plurality Approach

Wireless sensor networks consist of a large number of distributed sensor nodes so that potential risks are becoming more and more unpredictable. The new entrants pose the potential risks when they move into the secure zone. To build a door wall that provides safe and secured for the system, many recent research works applied the initial authentication process. However, the majority of the previous articles only focused on the Central Authority (CA) since this leads to an increase in the computation cost and energy consumption for the specific cases on the Internet of Things (IoT). Hence, in this article, we will lessen the importance of these third parties through proposing an enhanced authentication mechanism that includes key management and evaluation based on the past interactions to assist the objects joining a secured area without any nearby CA. We refer to a mobility dataset from CRAWDAD collected at the University Politehnica of Bucharest and rebuild into a new random dataset larger than the old one. The new one is an input for a simulated authenticating algorithm to observe the communication cost and resource usage of devices. Our proposal helps the authenticating flexible, being strict with unknown devices into the secured zone. The threshold of maximum friends can modify based on the optimization of the symmetric-key algorithm to diminish communication costs (our experimental results compare to previous schemes less than 2000 bits) and raise flexibility in resource-constrained environments.Comment: 27 page

A Key Establishment Scheme for Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks Using Post-Deployment Knowledge

Establishment of pairwise keys between sensor nodes in a sensor network is a difficult problem due to resource limitations of sensor nodes as well as vulnerability to physical captures of sensor nodes by the enemy. Public-key cryptosystems are not much suited for most resource-constrained sensor networks. Recently, elliptic curve cryptographic techniques show that public key cryptosystem is also feasible for resource-constrained sensor networks. However, most researchers accept that the symmetric key cryptosystems are viable options for resource-constrained sensor networks. In this paper, we first develop a basic principle to address the key pre-distribution problem in mobile sensor networks. Then, using this developed basic principle, we propose a scheme which takes the advantage of the post-deployment knowledge. Our scheme is a modified version of the key prioritization technique proposed by Liu and Ning. Our improved scheme provides reasonable network connectivity and security. Moreover, the proposed scheme works for any deployment topology.Comment: Published in International Journal of Computer Networks & Communications (IJCNC) Vol.3, No.4, July 201

Location-Aware Dynamic Session-Key Management for Grid-Based Wireless Sensor Networks

Security is a critical issue for sensor networks used in hostile environments. When wireless sensor nodes in a wireless sensor network are distributed in an insecure hostile environment, the sensor nodes must be protected: a secret key must be used to protect the nodes transmitting messages. If the nodes are not protected and become compromised, many types of attacks against the network may result. Such is the case with existing schemes, which are vulnerable to attacks because they mostly provide a hop-by-hop paradigm, which is insufficient to defend against known attacks. We propose a location-aware dynamic session-key management protocol for grid-based wireless sensor networks. The proposed protocol improves the security of a secret key. The proposed scheme also includes a key that is dynamically updated. This dynamic update can lower the probability of the key being guessed correctly. Thus currently known attacks can be defended. By utilizing the local information, the proposed scheme can also limit the flooding region in order to reduce the energy that is consumed in discovering routing paths