Energy Efficient Security Framework for Wireless Local Area Networks

Wireless networks are susceptible to network attacks due to their inherentvulnerabilities. The radio signal used in wireless transmission canarbitrarily propagate through walls and windows; thus a wireless networkperimeter is not exactly known. This leads them to be more vulnerable toattacks such as eavesdropping, message interception and modifications comparedto wired-line networks. Security services have been used as countermeasures toprevent such attacks, but they are used at the expense of resources that arescarce especially, where wireless devices have a very limited power budget.Hence, there is a need to provide security services that are energy efficient.In this dissertation, we propose an energy efficient security framework. Theframework aims at providing security services that take into account energyconsumption. We suggest three approaches to reduce the energy consumption ofsecurity protocols: replacement of standard security protocol primitives thatconsume high energy while maintaining the same security level, modification ofstandard security protocols appropriately, and a totally new design ofsecurity protocol where energy efficiency is the main focus. From ourobservation and study, we hypothesize that a higher level of energy savings isachievable if security services are provided in an adjustable manner. Wepropose an example tunable security or TuneSec system, which allows areasonably fine-grained security tuning to provide security services at thewireless link level in an adjustable manner.We apply the framework to several standard security protocols in wirelesslocal area networks and also evaluate their energy consumption performance.The first and second methods show improvements of up to 70% and 57% inenergy consumption compared to plain standard security protocols,respectively. The standard protocols can only offer fixed-level securityservices, and the methods applied do not change the security level. The thirdmethod shows further improvement compared to fixed-level security by reducing(about 6% to 40%) the energy consumed. This amount of energy saving can bevaried depending on the configuration and security requirements

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

A parallel block-based encryption schema for digital images using reversible cellular automata

AbstractWe propose a novel images encryption schema based on reversible one-dimensional cellular automata. Contrasting to the sequential operating mode of several existing approaches, the proposed one is fully parallelizable since the encryption/decryption tasks can be executed using multiple processes running independently for the same single image. The parallelization is made possible by defining a new RCA-based construction of an extended pseudorandom permutation that takes a nonce as a supplementary parameter. The defined PRP exploit the chaotic behavior and the high initial condition's sensitivity of the RCAs to ensure perfect cryptographic security properties. Results of various experiments and analysis show that high security and execution performances can be achieved using the approach, and furthermore, it provides the ability to perform a selective area decryption since any part of the ciphered-image can be deciphered independently from others, which is very useful for real time applications

A Better Key Schedule for DES-like Ciphers

Several DES-like ciphers aren't utilizing their full potential strength, because of the short key and linear or otherwise easily tractable algorithms they use to generate their key schedules. Using DES as example, we show a way to generate round subkeys to increase the cipher strength substantially by making relations between the round subkeys practically intractable