23,724 research outputs found

    Application of Transversal Design and Secure Path Key Establishment for Key Pre-Distribution in WSN

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    Wireless sensor network is composed of a number of sensor devices which can communicate with each other through radio wave. The sensor devices are limited with computation ability, communication ability, and memory capacity and battery power. This makes the implementation of any task in Wireless Sensor Network is very challenging. Amid various requirements, secure communication in Wireless sensor Network is a major requirement. Suppose two or more sensor nodes want to communicate with each other securely, they need such an environment which can fulfill all the security requirements amid the constraints mentioned earlier. Therefore, secure communication in this network is not an easy task. Two or more nodes can communicate using any cryptography scheme which can be applicable to this network. Nodes under communication process have to use one or more key for encryption and decryption. Single key for the entire network can serve for encryption and decryption of shared information. However compromising of that key may reveal the whole communication in the network. Therefore, although a single key for an entire network provides a certain range of security to the communication of the network, the resiliency of the network is very low which is not at all acceptable for secure communication. Keeping shared keys for every other node in the network is another option. However, increment of number of nodes in the network increases the key ring size of each node. Although it provides maximum resiliency, however, it suffers from non scalability due to memory constraints of sensor node. Another scheme is public key cryptography, which requires public key and private key for secure communication. It provides good resiliency to the network. However, it consumes much computation which is a limitation for its application in wireless sensor network. Key pre-distribution is an optimum scheme which loads a finite number of keys to each node taking from a set of predefined keys before deployment of the network. Pair of node which wants to communicate with each other searches for existence of any common key between them and if find start communication using that common key. If no such common key found, they establish a path for exchange of temporarily generated key and start communication using that key. Several key pre-distribution schemes have been proposed for distributing keys for secure communication. Pre-key distribution with merging of blocks is one of the major key pre-distribution schemes. We have studied that merging of nodes randomly incurred an amount of communication cost due to its randomness. We propose a scheme which will merge different blocks in a deterministic way yields a pattern of block ids in a node. Our aim is to decrease the communication task during key establishment. For our case, the communication cost during common key establishment is only O(1) which is constant, whereas in case of random merging it is O(z), where z is the merging factor. Therefore, scheme proposed by us mostly suitable for this type of network. Again in case of those communications which require temporary key, the communication is not secure due to the fact that if any intermediate nodes in the path between actual communicators become compromise, then the newly generated communication is revealed to the attacker. We have proposed two schemes which provide security to such temporarily generated key. One of them is Identity based public key cryptography for path key establishment which exchange the newly generated temporary key using Identity based public key encryption process using ηT pairing as bilinear tool. Although Public key encryption along with pairing needs only once for a particular session, however, due to public key encryption, it may not be appropriate for Wireless Sensor Networks. Therefore, we have revised our scheme and proposed another scheme Identity based symmetric key cryptography for path key establishment. This scheme consumes less computation cost due to symmetric approach for encryption of temporarily generated key. Therefore, this scheme is more appropriate for application in wireless Sensor Networks. Thus for the purpose of our thesis work, we have proposed a scheme which optimize the Key-pre Distribution strategy by using Deterministic technique of merging blocks to form node and hence facilitates less communication cost for pair-wise common key establishment. Again, for securing temporary key during Path Key Establishment, we have proposed two schemes which provide full security to the temporary key

    A Survey on Wireless Sensor Network Security

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    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

    An Outline of Security in Wireless Sensor Networks: Threats, Countermeasures and Implementations

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    With the expansion of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the need for securing the data flow through these networks is increasing. These sensor networks allow for easy-to-apply and flexible installations which have enabled them to be used for numerous applications. Due to these properties, they face distinct information security threats. Security of the data flowing through across networks provides the researchers with an interesting and intriguing potential for research. Design of these networks to ensure the protection of data faces the constraints of limited power and processing resources. We provide the basics of wireless sensor network security to help the researchers and engineers in better understanding of this applications field. In this chapter, we will provide the basics of information security with special emphasis on WSNs. The chapter will also give an overview of the information security requirements in these networks. Threats to the security of data in WSNs and some of their counter measures are also presented

    The Meeting of Acquaintances: A Cost-efficient Authentication Scheme for Light-weight Objects with Transient Trust Level and Plurality Approach

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    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

    Dynamic resiliency analysis of key predistribution in wireless sensor networks

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    Wireless sensor networks have been analyzed for more than a decade from operational and security points of view. Several key predistribution schemes have been proposed in the literature. Although valuable and state-of-the-art proposals have been made, their corresponding security analyses have not been performed by considering the dynamic nature of networking behavior and the time dimension. The sole metric used for resiliency analysis of key predistribution schemes is "fraction of links compromised" which is roughly defined as the ratio of secure communication links that the adversary can compromise over all secure links. However, this metric does not consider the dynamic nature of the network; it just analyzes a snapshot of the network without considering the time dimension. For example, possible dead nodes may cause change of routes and some captured links become useless for the attacker as time goes by. Moreover, an attacker cannot perform sensor node capturing at once, but performs over time. That is why a methodology for dynamic security analysis is needed in order to analyze the change of resiliency in time a more realistic way. In this paper, we propose such a dynamic approach to measure the resiliency of key predistribution schemes in sensor networks. We take the time dimension into account with a new performance metric, "captured message fraction". This metric is defined as the percentage of the messages generated within the network to be forwarded to the base station (sink) that are captured and read by the attacker. Our results show that for the cases where the static fraction of links compromised metric indicates approximately 40% of the links are compromised, our proposed captured message fraction metric shows 80% of the messages are captured by the attacker. This clearly proves the limitations of the static resiliency analysis in the literature

    Multiphase deployment models for fast self healing in wireless sensor networks

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    The majority of studies on security in resource limited wireless sensor networks (WSN) focus on finding an efficient balance among energy consumption, computational speed and memory usage. Besides these resources, time is a relatively immature aspect that can be considered in system design and performance evaluations. In a recent study(Castelluccia and Spognardi, 2007), the time dimension is used to lower the ratio of compromised links, thus, improving resiliency in key distribution in WSNs. This is achieved by making the old and possibly compromised keys useful only for a limited amount of time. In this way, the effect of compromised keys diminish in time, so the WSN selfheals. In this study we further manipulate the time dimension and propose a deployment model that speeds up the resilience improvement process with a tradeoff between connectivity and resiliency. In our method, self healing speeds up by introducing nodes that belong to future generations in the time scale. In this way, the duration that the adversary can make use of compromised keys become smaller
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