Secure Hop-by-Hop Aggregation of End-to-End Concealed Data in Wireless Sensor Networks

In-network data aggregation is an essential technique in mission critical wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for achieving effective transmission and hence better power conservation. Common security protocols for aggregated WSNs are either hop-by-hop or end-to-end, each of which has its own encryption schemes considering different security primitives. End-to-end encrypted data aggregation protocols introduce maximum data secrecy with in-efficient data aggregation and more vulnerability to active attacks, while hop-by-hop data aggregation protocols introduce maximum data integrity with efficient data aggregation and more vulnerability to passive attacks. In this paper, we propose a secure aggregation protocol for aggregated WSNs deployed in hostile environments in which dual attack modes are present. Our proposed protocol is a blend of flexible data aggregation as in hop-by-hop protocols and optimal data confidentiality as in end-to-end protocols. Our protocol introduces an efficient O(1) heuristic for checking data integrity along with cost-effective heuristic-based divide and conquer attestation process which is $O(\ln{n})$ in average -O(n) in the worst scenario- for further verification of aggregated results

A Distributed Approach to Security in Sensornets

Abstract — Secure communication is an important aspect of any network and it has largely remained unexplored in wireless sensor networks (WSN). Security becomes a major challenge because of ad-hoc and resource constrained nature of sensor networks. In this paper we present a scalable and distributed security protocol, DSPS, for WSN that fits in between the network and the transport layers. DSPS satisfies the essential requirements of secure communication such as Data Confidentiality, Data Authentication, Data Integrity and Data Freshness. Basic building blocks of our security protocol are Key Generation-Distribution and Signatures. The key is a 56-bit random number generated initially by a key server, which is then securely distributed to all the nodes in the cluster. This key is used for encryption. DSPS also supports security critical transactions by dynamically generating a key, which can be shared between two nodes. The simplicity of DSPS allows compatibility with most of the routing protocols. Keywords-component; wireless sensor networks (WSN); security protocols; I

Securing Internet of Things with Lightweight IPsec

Real-world deployments of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) require secure communication. It is important that a receiver is able to verify that sensor data was generated by trusted nodes. In some cases it may also be necessary to encrypt sensor data in transit. Recently, WSNs and traditional IP networks are more tightly integrated using IPv6 and 6LoWPAN. Available IPv6 protocol stacks can use IPsec to secure data exchange. Thus, it is desirable to extend 6LoWPAN such that IPsec communication with IPv6 nodes is possible. It is beneficial to use IPsec because the existing end-points on the Internet do not need to be modified to communicate securely with the WSN. Moreover, using IPsec, true end-to-end security is implemented and the need for a trustworthy gateway is removed. In this paper we provide End-to-End (E2E) secure communication between an IP enabled sensor nodes and a device on traditional Internet. This is the first compressed lightweight design, implementation, and evaluation of 6LoWPAN extension for IPsec on Contiki. Our extension supports both IPsec's Authentication Header (AH) and Encapsulation Security Payload (ESP). Thus, communication endpoints are able to authenticate, encrypt and check the integrity of messages using standardized and established IPv6 mechanisms

Attacking and securing beacon-enabled 802.15.4 networks

The IEEE 802.15.4 standard has attracted timecritical applications in wireless sensor networks because of its beacon-enabled mode and guaranteed timeslots (GTSs). However, the GTS management scheme’s security mechanisms still leave the 802.15.4 medium access control vulnerable to attacks. Further, the existing techniques in the literature for securing 802.15.4 networks either focus on nonbeacon-enabled 802.15.4 networks or cannot defend against insider attacks for beacon-enabled 802.15.4 networks. In this paper, we illustrate this by demonstrating attacks on the availability and integrity of the beaconenabled 802.15.4 network. To confirm the validity of the attacks, we implement the attacks using Tmote Sky motes for wireless sensor nodes, where the malicious node is deployed as an inside attacker. We show that the malicious node can freely exploit information retrieved from the beacon frames to compromise the integrity and availability of the network. To defend against these attacks, we present BCN-Sec, a protocol that ensures the integrity of data and control frames in beacon-enabled 802.15.4 networks. We implement BCN-Sec, and show its efficacy during various attacks

ADA: Authenticated Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks are vulnerable to communication failures and security attacks. It is quite challenging to provide security to data aggregation. This paper proposes Authenticated Data Aggregation for Wireless Sensor Networks, where the nodes organize themselves into tiers around the sink. Message Authentication Code (MAC) is generated and transmitted along with the synopsis to ensure integrity. All nodes in the network store the same key that is used for rekeying operation during each round to generate MAC. Thus ADA ensures data freshness and integrity at a communication cost of O (1). Simulation results show that the proposed ADA protocol results in high security, low energy consumption and low communication cost compared to the state-of-the art protocol

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

Secure and Reliable Routing Protocol for Transmission Data in Wireless Sensor Mesh Networks

Abstract Sensor nodes collect data from the physical world then exchange it until it reaches the intended destination. This information can be sensitive, such as battlefield surveillance. Therefore, providing secure and continuous data transmissions among sensor nodes in wireless network environments is crucial. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have limited resources, limited computation capabilities, and the exchange of data through the air and deployment in accessible areas makes the energy, security, and routing major concerns in WSN. In this research we are looking at security issues for the above reasons. WSN is susceptible to malicious activities such as hacking and physical attacks. In general, security threats are classified depending on the layers. Physical, Transport, Network, Data link, and the Application layer. Sensor nodes can be placed in an unfriendly environments and it has lower power energy, computation and bandwidth, are exposed to a failure, and the WSN topology dynamically unstable. The recent wireless sensor protocols are intended for data communication transmission energy consumption. Therefore, many do not consider the security in WSN as much as they should and it might be vulnerable to attacks. Standard crypto systems methods aim to protect the authentication and integrity of data packets during the transmission stage between senders and receivers. In this dissertation we present Adel which is a novel routing protocol for exchanging data through wireless sensor mesh networks using Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm. Adel enhances security level during data transmission between sender party and receiver party in wireless network environment. Once the sensor nodes are deployed in a network, they need to inform their location and their data related to the security for the further communication in the network. For that purpose, ii an efficient mechanism is implemented in order to perform better communication among sensor nodes. Adel generates dynamic routing table using ACO algorithm with all the necessary information from network nodes after being deployed. Adel works with minimum routing restrictions and exploits the advantages of the three multicast routing styles, unicast, path, and mesh based. Since it takes a routing decision with a minimum number of nodes using the shortest path between the sender and the receiver nodes, Adel is applicable in static networks. Four essential performance metrics in mesh networks, network security analysis, network latency time, network packets drop, network delivery ratio, and network throughput are evaluated. Adel routing protocol has met the most important security requirements such as authorization, authentication, confidentiality, and integrity. It also grantees the absence of the cycle path problem in the network.This research reports the implementation and the performance of the proposed protocol using network simulator NS-2. The seven main parameters are considered for evaluation all experiments are security trust, packets drop, energy consumption, throughput, end to end delay and packet delivery ratio. The results show that the proposed system can significantly enhance the network security and connectivity level compared to other routing protocols. Yet, as expected, it did not do so well in energy consumption since our main goal was to provide higher level of security and connectivit

iPDA: An Integrity-Protecting Private Data Aggregation Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Data aggregation is an efficient mechanism widely used in wireless sensor networks (WSN) to collect statistics about data of interests. However, the shared-medium nature of communication makes the WSNs are vulnerable to eavesdropping and packet tampering/injection by adversaries. Hence, how to protect data privacy and data integrity are two major challenges for data aggregation in wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we present iPDA??????an integrity-protecting private data aggregation scheme. In iPDA, data privacy is achieved through data slicing and assembling technique; and data integrity is achieved through redundancy by constructing disjoint aggregation paths/trees to collect data of interests. In iPDA, the data integrity-protection and data privacy-preservation mechanisms work synergistically. We evaluate the iPDA scheme in terms of the efficacy of privacy preservation, communication overhead, and data aggregation accuracy, comparing with a typical data aggregation scheme--- TAG, where no integrity protection and privacy preservation is provided. Both theoretical analysis and simulation results show that iPDA achieves the design goals while still maintains the efficiency of data aggregation