A Lightweight Authentication and Key Management Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Security problem is one of the most popular research fields in wireless sensor networks for both the application requirement and the resource-constrained essence. An effective and lightweight Authentication and Key Management Scheme (AKMS) is proposed in this paper to solve the problem of malicious nodes occurring in the process of networking and to offer a high level of security with low cost. For the condition that the mobile sensor nodes need to be authenticated, the keys in AKMS will be dynamically generated and adopted for security protection. Even when the keys are being compromised or captured, the attackers can neither use the previous keys nor misuse the authenticated nodes to cheat. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme provides more efficient security with less energy consumption for wireless sensor networks especially with mobile sensors

A Systematic Key Management Mechanism for Practical Body Sensor Networks

Security plays a vital role in promoting the practicality of Wireless Body Sensor Networks (BSNs), which provides a promising solution to precise human physiological status monitoring. A fundamental security issue in BSN is key management, including establishment and maintenance of the key system. However, current BSN key management solutions are either designed for specific phases of a BSN’s life-time or restricted to strong assumptions such as homogeneous BSN composition, pre-deployed key materials, and existing secure path, which limits their applications in real-world BSNs. In this paper, we develop the Systematic Key Management (SKM) for practical BSNs, where basic human interactions are conducted for non-predeployed secure BSN initialization, and authenticated key agreement is achieved using lightweight non-pairing certificateless public key cryptography. We construct a BSN prototype consisting of selfdesigned motes and Android phones to evaluate the real-world performance of SKM. Through extensive simulations and test-bed experiments, we demonstrate that our lightweight SKM scheme manages to provide high security guarantee while outperforming state-of-the-art approaches in terms of both computation and storage efficiency

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

BANZKP: a Secure Authentication Scheme Using Zero Knowledge Proof for WBANs

-Wireless body area network(WBAN) has shown great potential in improving healthcare quality not only for patients but also for medical staff. However, security and privacy are still an important issue in WBANs especially in multi-hop architectures. In this paper, we propose and present the design and the evaluation of a secure lightweight and energy efficient authentication scheme BANZKP based on an efficient cryptographic protocol, Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) and a commitment scheme. ZKP is used to confirm the identify of the sensor nodes, with small computational requirement, which is favorable for body sensors given their limited resources, while the commitment scheme is used to deal with replay attacks and hence the injection attacks by committing a message and revealing the key later. Our scheme reduces the memory requirement by 56.13 % compared to TinyZKP [13], the comparable alternative so far for Body Area Networks, and uses 10 % less energy

A LIGHTWEIGHT PROTECTED SCHEME FOR DETECTING ATTRIBUTION FORGERY AND PACKET DROP ATTACKS IN WSN

IN Wireless sensor networks Large-scale sensor networks are deployed in numerous application domains, and the data they collect are used in decision-making for critical infrastructures. Data are streamed from multiple sources through intermediate processing nodes that aggregate information. A malicious adversary may introduce additional nodes in the network or compromise existing ones. Therefore, assuring high data trustworthiness is crucial for correct decision-making. Data provenance represents a key factor in evaluating the trustworthiness of sensor data. Provenance management for sensor networks introduces several challenging requirements, such as low energy and bandwidth consumption, efficient storage and secure transmission. In this paper, we propose a novel lightweight scheme to securely transmit provenance for sensor data. The proposed technique relies on in-packet Bloom filters to encode provenance. We introduce efficient mechanisms for provenance verification and reconstruction at the base station. In addition, we extend the secure provenance scheme with functionality to detect packet drop attacks staged by malicious data forwarding nodes. We evaluate the proposed technique both analytically and empirically, and the results prove the effectiveness and efficiency of the lightweight secure provenance scheme in detecting packet forgery and loss attacks

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