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

A Survey on Spoofing and Selective Forwarding Attacks on Zigbee based WSN

The main focus of WSN is to gather data from the physical world. It is often deployed for sensing, processing as well as disseminating information of the targeted physical environments. The main objective of the WSN is to collect data from the target environment using sensors as well as transmit those data to the desired place of choice. In order to achieve an efficient performance, WSN should have efficient as well as reliable networking protocols. The most popular technology behind WSN is Zigbee. In this paper a pilot study is done on important security issues on spoofing and selective forwarding attack on Zigbee based WSN. This paper identifies the security vulnerabilities of Zigbee network and gaps in the existing methodologies to address the security issues and will help the future researchers to narrow down their research in WSN.Keywords: Zigbee, WSN, Protocol Stack, Spoofing and Selective Forwarding

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

A Comprehensive Survey on Routing and Security in Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks

With the continuous advances in mobile wirelesssensor networks (MWSNs), the research community hasresponded to the challenges and constraints in the design of thesenetworks by proposing efficient routing protocols that focus onparticular performance metrics such as residual energy utilization,mobility, topology, scalability, localization, data collection routing,Quality of Service (QoS), etc. In addition, the introduction ofmobility in WSN has brought new challenges for the routing,stability, security, and reliability of WSNs. Therefore, in thisarticle, we present a comprehensive and meticulous investigationin the routing protocols and security challenges in the theory ofMWSNs which was developed in recent years

Design and Implementation of Intrusion Detection Systems using RPL and AOVD Protocols-based Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technology has grown in importance in recent years. All WSN implementations need secure data transmission between sensor nodes and base stations. Sensor node attacks introduce new threats to the WSN. As a result, an appropriate Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is required in WSN for defending against security attacks and detecting attacks on sensor nodes. In this study, we use the Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) for addressing security services in WSN by identifying IDS with a network size of more or less 20 nodes and introducing 10% malicious nodes. The method described above is used on Cooja in the VMware virtual machine Workstation with the InstantContiki2.7 operating system. To track the movement of nodes, find network attacks, and spot dropped packets during IDS in WSN, an algorithm is implemented in the Network Simulator (NS2) using the Ad-hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) protocol in the Linux operating system.Keywords—Intrusion Detection Systems, wireless sensor networks, Cooja simulator, sensor nodes, NS