6,880 research outputs found
Solutions and Tools for Secure Communication in Wireless Sensor Networks
Secure communication is considered a vital requirement in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications. Such a requirement embraces different aspects, including confidentiality, integrity and authenticity of exchanged information, proper management of security material, and effective prevention and reaction against security threats and attacks. However, WSNs are mainly composed of resource-constrained devices. That is, network nodes feature reduced capabilities, especially in terms of memory storage, computing power, transmission rate, and energy availability.
As a consequence, assuring secure communication in WSNs results to be more difficult than in other kinds of network. In fact, trading effectiveness of adopted solutions with their efficiency becomes far more important. In addition, specific device classes or technologies may require to design ad hoc security solutions. Also, it is necessary to efficiently manage security material, and dynamically cope with changes of security requirements. Finally, security threats and countermeasures have to be carefully considered since from the network design phase.
This Ph.D. dissertion considers secure communication in WSNs, and provides the following contributions. First, we provide a performance evaluation of IEEE 802.15.4 security services. Then, we focus on the ZigBee technology and its security services, and propose possible solutions to some deficiencies and inefficiencies. Second, we present HISS, a highly scalable and efficient key management scheme, able to contrast collusion attacks while displaying a graceful degradation of performance. Third, we present STaR, a software component for WSNs that secures multiple traffic flows at the same time. It is transparent to the application, and provides runtime reconfigurability, thus coping with dynamic changes of security requirements. Finally, we describe ASF, our attack simulation framework for WSNs. Such a tool helps network designers to quantitatively evaluate effects of security attacks, produce an attack ranking based on their severity, and thus select the most appropriate countermeasures
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 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
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