An Authentication Protocol for Future Sensor Networks

Authentication is one of the essential security services in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) for ensuring secure data sessions. Sensor node authentication ensures the confidentiality and validity of data collected by the sensor node, whereas user authentication guarantees that only legitimate users can access the sensor data. In a mobile WSN, sensor and user nodes move across the network and exchange data with multiple nodes, thus experiencing the authentication process multiple times. The integration of WSNs with Internet of Things (IoT) brings forth a new kind of WSN architecture along with stricter security requirements; for instance, a sensor node or a user node may need to establish multiple concurrent secure data sessions. With concurrent data sessions, the frequency of the re-authentication process increases in proportion to the number of concurrent connections, which makes the security issue even more challenging. The currently available authentication protocols were designed for the autonomous WSN and do not account for the above requirements. In this paper, we present a novel, lightweight and efficient key exchange and authentication protocol suite called the Secure Mobile Sensor Network (SMSN) Authentication Protocol. In the SMSN a mobile node goes through an initial authentication procedure and receives a re-authentication ticket from the base station. Later a mobile node can use this re-authentication ticket when establishing multiple data exchange sessions and/or when moving across the network. This scheme reduces the communication and computational complexity of the authentication process. We proved the strength of our protocol with rigorous security analysis and simulated the SMSN and previously proposed schemes in an automated protocol verifier tool. Finally, we compared the computational complexity and communication cost against well-known authentication protocols.Comment: This article is accepted for the publication in "Sensors" journal. 29 pages, 15 figure

Seamless key agreement framework for mobile-sink in IoT based cloud-centric secured public safety sensor networks

Recently, the Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged as a significant advancement for Internet and mobile networks with various public safety network applications. An important use of IoT-based solutions is its application in post-disaster management, where the traditional telecommunication systems may be either completely or partially damaged. Since enabling technologies have restricted authentication privileges for mobile users, in this paper, a strategy of mobile-sink is introduced for the extension of user authentication over cloud-based environments. A seamless secure authentication and key agreement (S-SAKA) approach using bilinear pairing and elliptic-curve cryptosystems is presented. It is shown that the proposed S-SAKA approach satisfies the security properties, and as well as being resilient to nodecapture attacks, it also resists significant numbers of other well-known potential attacks related with data confidentiality, mutual authentication, session-key agreement, user anonymity, password guessing, and key impersonation. Moreover, the proposed approach can provide a seamless connectivity through authentication over wireless sensor networks to alleviate the computation and communication cost constraints in the system. In addition, using Burrows–Abadi–Needham logic, it is demonstrated that the proposed S-SAKA framework offers proper mutual authentication and session key agreement between the mobile-sink and the base statio

Seamless key agreement framework for mobile-sink in IoT based cloud-centric secured public safety sensor networks

Recently, the Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged as a significant advancement for Internet and mobile networks with various public safety network applications. An important use of IoT-based solutions is its application in post-disaster management, where the traditional telecommunication systems may be either completely or partially damaged. Since enabling technologies have restricted authentication privileges for mobile users, in this paper, a strategy of mobile-sink is introduced for the extension of user authentication over cloud-based environments. A seamless secure authentication and key agreement (S-SAKA) approach using bilinear pairing and elliptic-curve cryptosystems is presented. It is shown that the proposed S-SAKA approach satisfies the security properties, and as well as being resilient to nodecapture attacks, it also resists significant numbers of other well-known potential attacks related with data confidentiality, mutual authentication, session-key agreement, user anonymity, password guessing, and key impersonation. Moreover, the proposed approach can provide a seamless connectivity through authentication over wireless sensor networks to alleviate the computation and communication cost constraints in the system. In addition, using Burrows–Abadi–Needham logic, it is demonstrated that the proposed S-SAKA framework offers proper mutual authentication and session key agreement between the mobile-sink and the base statio

Factors Impacting Key Management Effectiveness in Secured Wireless Networks

The use of a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) offers a cryptographic solution that can overcome many, but not all, of the MANET security problems. One of the most critical aspects of a PKI system is how well it implements Key Management. Key Management deals with key generation, key storage, key distribution, key updating, key revocation, and certificate service in accordance with security policies over the lifecycle of the cryptography. The approach supported by traditional PKI works well in fixed wired networks, but it may not appropriate for MANET due to the lack of fixed infrastructure to support the PKI. This research seeks to identify best practices in securing networks which may be applied to new network architectures

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