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

Secure Many-to-One Communications in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are formed by nodes with limited computational and power resources. WSNs are finding an increasing number of applications, both civilian and military, most of which require security for the sensed data being collected by the base station from remote sensor nodes. In addition, when many sensor nodes transmit to the base station, the implosion problem arises. Providing security measures and implosion-resistance in a resource-limited environment is a real challenge. This article reviews the aggregation strategies proposed in the literature to handle the bandwidth and security problems related to many-to-one transmission in WSNs. Recent contributions to secure lossless many-to-one communication developed by the authors in the context of several Spanish-funded projects are surveyed. Ongoing work on the secure lossy many-to-one communication is also sketched

Comparison of authentication schemes for wireless sensor networks as applied to secure data aggregation

Il processo di aggregazione è fondamentale nell'economia energetica di una rete di sensori wireless (WSN). Tale processo, però, pone delle nuove sfide sul piano della sicurezza, dettate dagli stringenti vincoli di complessità tipici di una WSN. In questa tesi, in particolare, si indaga l'applicabilità degli algoritmi di autenticazione al contesto dell'aggregazion

A bilinear pairing based secure data aggregation scheme for WSNs

End to end secure data aggregation scheme for wireless sensor networks that are based on public key cryptography generally use elliptic curves. However elliptic curve based protocols require messages to be mapped to elliptic curves before performing any operations and finally reverse mapped to retrieve the message back. No mapping function, however, which is both homomorphic and has an efficient reverse mapping function is currently known. The mapping functions used in many previous protocols require brute forcing to reverse map the message from a point on the elliptic curve. This solution may be feasible on a base station with unlimited energy and processing power but it means that decrypting becomes very inefficient on ordinary sensors. We propose a secure data aggregation algorithm based on bilinear pairing that avoids this problem and makes decrypting data feasible on ordinary sensors

Energy efficient security and privacy management in sensor clouds

Sensor Cloud is a new model of computing for Wireless Sensor Networks, which facilitates resource sharing and enables large scale sensor networks. A multi-user distributed system, however, where resources are shared, has inherent challenges in security and privacy. The data being generated by the wireless sensors in a sensor cloud need to be protected against adversaries, which may be outsiders as well as insiders. Similarly the code which is disseminated to the sensors by the sensor cloud needs to be protected against inside and outside adversaries. Moreover, since the wireless sensors cannot support complex, energy intensive measures, the security and privacy of the data and the code have to be attained by way of lightweight algorithms. In this work, we first present two data aggregation algorithms, one based on an Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem (ECC) and the other based on symmetric key system, which provide confidentiality and integrity of data against an outside adversary and privacy against an in network adversary. A fine grained access control scheme which works on the securely aggregated data is presented next. This scheme uses Attribute Based Encryption (ABE) to achieve this objective. Finally, to securely and efficiently disseminate code in the sensor cloud, we present a code dissemination algorithm which first reduces the amount of code to be transmitted from the base station. It then uses Symmetric Proxy Re-encryption along with Bloom filters and HMACs to protect the code against eavesdropping and false code injection attacks. --Abstract, page iv

Privacy-Aware and Secure Decentralized Air Quality Monitoring

Indoor Air Quality monitoring is a major asset to improving quality of life and building management. Today, the evolution of embedded technologies allows the implementation of such monitoring on the edge of the network. However, several concerns need to be addressed related to data security and privacy, routing and sink placement optimization, protection from external monitoring, and distributed data mining. In this paper, we describe an integrated framework that features distributed storage, blockchain-based Role-based Access Control, onion routing, routing and sink placement optimization, and distributed data mining to answer these concerns. We describe the organization of our contribution and show its relevance with simulations and experiments over a set of use cases