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

MPKMS: a Matrix-based Pairwise Key Management Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Due to the sensitivity of the Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) applications and resource constraints, authentication and key management emerge as a challenging issue for WSN. In general, various approaches have been developed for the key management in WSN. This paper has come up with a new robust key pre-distribution scheme using random polynomial functions and matrix. This new proposed scheme significantly increases the storage efficiency and provides resilience to network against node capture by using random prime numbers, polynomial functions and matrix properties. The effectiveness of the scheme is demonstrated through a security analysis and comparison with the existing schemes

MPKMS: A Matrix-based Pairwise Key Management Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Due to the sensitivity of the Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) applications and resource constraints, authentication and key management emerge as a challenging issue for WSN. In general, various approaches have been developed for the key management in WSN. This paper has come up with a new robust key pre-distribution scheme using random polynomial functions and matrix. This new proposed scheme significantly increases the storage efficiency and provides resilience to network against node capture by using random prime numbers, polynomial functions and matrix properties. The effectiveness of the scheme is demonstrated through a security analysis and comparison with the existing schemes

Key Management Building Blocks for Wireless Sensor Networks

Cryptography is the means to ensure data confidentiality, integrity and authentication in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). To use cryptography effectively however, the cryptographic keys need to be managed properly. First of all, the necessary keys need to be distributed to the nodes before the nodes are deployed in the field, in such a way that any two or more nodes that need to communicate securely can establish a session key. Then, the session keys need to be refreshed from time to time to prevent birthday attacks. Finally, in case any of the nodes is found to be compromised, the key ring of the compromised node needs to be revoked and some or all of the compromised keys might need to be replaced. These processes, together with the policies and techniques needed to support them, are called key management. The facts that WSNs (1) are generally not tamper-resistant; (2) operate unattended; (3) communicate in an open medium; (4) have no fixed infrastructure and pre-configured topology; (5) have severe hardware and resource constraints, present unique challenges to key management. In this article, we explore techniques for meeting these challenges. What distinguishes our approach from a routine literature survey is that, instead of comparing various known schemes, we set out to identify the basic cryptographic principles, or building blocks that will allow practitioners to set up their own key management framework using these building blocks

A Survey of Cryptography and Key Management Schemes for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are made up of a large number of tiny sensors, which can sense, analyze, and communicate information about the outside world. These networks play a significant role in a broad range of fields, from crucial military surveillance applications to monitoring building security. Key management in WSNs is a critical task. While the security and integrity of messages communicated through these networks and the authenticity of the nodes are dependent on the robustness of the key management schemes, designing an efficient key generation, distribution, and revocation scheme is quite challenging. While resource-constrained sensor nodes should not be exposed to computationally demanding asymmetric key algorithms, the use of symmetric key-based systems leaves the entire network vulnerable to several attacks. This chapter provides a comprehensive survey of several well-known cryptographic mechanisms and key management schemes for WSNs

Lightweight cryptographic protocols for mobile devices

Title from PDF of title page viewed June 30, 2020Dissertation advisor: Lein HarnIncludes bibliographical references (pages 146-163)Thesis (Ph.D.)--School of Computing and Engineering. University of Missouri--Kansas City. 2020In recent years, a wide range of resource-constrained devices have been built and integrated into many networked systems. These devices collect and transfer data over the Internet in order for users to access the data or to control these devices remotely. However, the data also may contain sensitive information such as medical records or credit card numbers. This underscores the importance of protecting potentially sensitive data before it is transferred over the network. To provide security services such as data confidentiality and authentication, these devices must be provided with cryptographic keys to encrypt the data. Designing security schemes for resource-limited devices is a challenging task due to the inherit characteristics of these devices which are limited memory, processing power and battery life. In this dissertation, we propose lightweight polynomial-based cryptographic protocols in three environments that encompass resource-constrained devices which are Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), Fog Computing, and Blockchain Network. With polynomial-based schemes, we guarantee high network connectivity due to the existence of a shared pairwise key between every pair of nodes in the network. More importantly, the proposed schemes are lightweight which means they exhibit low memory, processing and communication overheads for resource-constrained devices compared with other schemes. The only problem with polynomial-based schemes is that they suffer from node-captured attacks. That is, when an attacker captured a specific number of nodes, the attacker could compromise the security of the whole network. In this dissertation, we propose, for the first time, polynomial-based schemes with probabilistic security in WSNs. That is, when the attacker captured a specific number of sensor nodes, there is a low probability the attacker could compromised the security of the whole network. We show how we can modify system’s parameters to lower such attacks.Introduction -- Overview of cryptographical key distribution schemes -- Related work -- Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNS) -- Fog computing -- Blockchain Networks -- Conclusion and future wor

Efficient And Secure Key Distribution Protocol For Wireless Sensor Networks

Modern wireless sensor networks have adopted the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. This standard defines the first two layers, the physical and medium access control layers; determines the radio wave used for communication, and defines the 128-bit advanced encryption standard (AES-128) for encrypting and validating transmitted data. However, the standard does not specify how to manage, store, or distribute encryption keys. Many solutions have been proposed to address this problem, but the majority are impractical in resource-constrained devices such as wireless sensor nodes or cause degradation of other metrics. Therefore, we propose an efficient and secure key distribution protocol that is simple, practical, and feasible to implement on resource-constrained wireless sensor nodes. We conduct simulations and hardware implementations to analyze our work and compare it to existing solutions based on different metrics, such as energy consumption, storage overhead, key connectivity, replay attack, man-in-the-middle attack, and resiliency to node capture attack. Our findings show that the proposed protocol is secure and more efficient than other solutions

Design and analysis of adaptive hierarchical low-power long-range networks

A new phase of evolution of Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication has started where vertical Internet of Things (IoT) deployments dedicated to a single application domain gradually change to multi-purpose IoT infrastructures that service different applications across multiple industries. New networking technologies are being deployed operating over sub-GHz frequency bands that enable multi-tenant connectivity over long distances and increase network capacity by enforcing low transmission rates to increase network capacity. Such networking technologies allow cloud-based platforms to be connected with large numbers of IoT devices deployed several kilometres from the edges of the network. Despite the rapid uptake of Long-power Wide-area Networks (LPWANs), it remains unclear how to organize the wireless sensor network in a scaleable and adaptive way. This paper introduces a hierarchical communication scheme that utilizes the new capabilities of Long-Range Wireless Sensor Networking technologies by combining them with broadly used 802.11.4-based low-range low-power technologies. The design of the hierarchical scheme is presented in detail along with the technical details on the implementation in real-world hardware platforms. A platform-agnostic software firmware is produced that is evaluated in real-world large-scale testbeds. The performance of the networking scheme is evaluated through a series of experimental scenarios that generate environments with varying channel quality, failing nodes, and mobile nodes. The performance is evaluated in terms of the overall time required to organize the network and setup a hierarchy, the energy consumption and the overall lifetime of the network, as well as the ability to adapt to channel failures. The experimental analysis indicate that the combination of long-range and short-range networking technologies can lead to scalable solutions that can service concurrently multiple applications