FSDA: Framework for Secure Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Network for Enhancing Key Management

An effective key management plays a crucial role in imposing a resilient security technique in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). After reviewing the existing approaches of key management, it is confirmed that existing approachs does not offer good coverage on all potential security breaches in WSN. With WSN being essential part of Internet-of-Things (IoT), the existing approaches of key management can definitely not address such security breaches. Therefore, this paper introduces a Framework for Secure Data Aggregation (FSDA) that hybridizes the public key encryption mechanism in order to obtain a novel key management system. The proposed system does not target any specific attacks but is widely applicable for both internal and external attacks in WSN owing to its design principle. The study outcome exhibits that proposed FSDA offers highly reduced computational burden, minimal delay, less energy consumption, and higher data transmission perforance in contrast to frequency used encryption schemes in WSN

Secure Protocols for Key Pre-distribution, Network Discovery, and Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks

The term sensor network is used to refer to a broad class of networks where several small devices, called sensors, are deployed in order to gather data and report back to one or more base stations. Traditionally, sensors are assumed to be small, low-cost, battery-powered, wireless, computationally constrained, and memory constrained devices equipped with some sort of specialized sensing equipment. In many settings, these sensors must be resilient to individual node failure and malicious attacks by an adversary, despite their constrained nature. This thesis is concerned with security during all phases of a sensor network's lifetime: pre-deployment, deployment, operation, and maintenance. This is accomplished by pre-loading nodes with symmetric keys according to a new family of combinatorial key pre-distribution schemes to facilitate secure communication between nodes using minimal storage overhead, and without requiring expensive public-key operations. This key pre-distribution technique is then utilized to construct a secure network discovery protocol, which allows a node to correctly learn the local network topology, even in the presence of active malicious nodes. Finally, a family of secure aggregation protocols are presented that allow for data to be efficiently collected from the entire network at a much lower cost than collecting readings individually, even if an active adversary is present. The key pre-distribution schemes are built from a family of combinatorial designs that allow for a concise mathematical analysis of their performance, but unlike previous approaches, do not suffer from strict constraints on the network size or number of keys per node. The network discovery protocol is focused on providing nodes with an accurate view of the complete topology so that multiple node-disjoint paths can be established to a destination, even if an adversary is present at the time of deployment. This property allows for the use of many existing multi-path protocols that rely on the existence of such node-disjoint paths. The aggregation protocols are the first designed for simple linear networks, but generalize naturally to other classes of networks. Proofs of security are provided for all protocols

Key Management in Wireless Sensor Networks, IP-Based Sensor Networks, Content Centric Networks

Cryptographic keys and their management in network communication is considered the main building block of security over which other security primitives are based. These cryptographic keys ensure the privacy, authentication, integrity and non-repudiation of messages. However, the use of these cryptographic keys and their management in dealing with the resource constrained devices (i.e. Sensor nodes) is a challenging task. A number of key management schemes have been introduced by researchers all over the world for such resource constrained networks. For example, light weight PKI and elliptic curve cryptography schemes are computationally expensive for these resource constrained devices. So far the symmetric key approach is considered best for these constrained networks and different variants of it been developed for these networks (i.e. probabilistic key distribution approach). The probabilistic key distribution approach consumes less memory than the standard symmetric key approach but it suffers from the connectivity issues (i.e. the connectivity depends on the common shared keys between the nodes). Most of those schemes were proposed by considering static sensor networks (e.g. Industrial process monitoring, Environmental monitoring, movement detection in military applications, forests etc.). However, the use of these existing key management schemes for mobile wireless sensor networks applications introduces more challenges in terms of network connectivity, energy consumption, memory cost, communication overhead and protection of key materials against some well known attacks. Keeping these challenges in mind, previous research has proposed some key management schemes considering the mobility scenarios in ad hoc networks and wireless sensor networks (e.g. vehicular networks, health monitoring systems).However these schemes consume more resource because of a much higher communication packet exchange during the handover phase for the authentication of joining and leaving nodes than the static networks where there is no extra communication for the handover and authentication. The motivation of this research work is to investigate and propose new algorithms not only to improve the efficiency of these existing authentication and key management schemes in terms of connectivity, memory and security by considering the mobility scenario in wireless sensor networks, but also to develop new algorithms that suit these constrained networks than the existing schemes. First, we choose the existing key pool approach for authentication and key management and improve its network connectivity and resilience against some well known attacks (e.g. node capturing attacks) while reduce the memory cost by storing those key pools in each sensor node. In the proposed solution, we have divided the main key pool into two virtual mutually exclusive key pools. This division and constructing a key from two chosen keys, one from each key pool, helps to reduce the memory cost of each node by assigning fewer keys for the same level of network connectivity as the existing key pool frameworks. Although, the proposed key pool approach increases the network resilience against node compromission attacks because of the smaller number of keys assigned to each node, however it does not completely nullify the effect of the attacks. Hence we proposed an online mutual authentication and key establishment and management scheme for sensor networks that provides almost 100\% network connectivity and also nullifies the effect of node compromission attacks. In the proposed online key generation approach, the secret key is dependent on both communicating parties. Once the two communicating parties authenticate each other, they would successfully establish a secret communication key, otherwise they stop communication and inform the network manager about the intruder detection and activity. The last part of the thesis considers the integration of two different technologies (i.e. wireless sensor networks and IP networks). This is a very interesting and demanding research area because of its numerous applications, such as smart energy, smart city etc.. However the security requirements of these two kind of networks (resource constrained and resourceful) make key management a challenging task. Hence we use an online key generation approach using elliptic curve cryptography which gives the same security level as the standard PKI approach used in IP networks with smaller key length and is suited for the sensor network packet size limitations. It also uses a less computationally expensive approach than PKI and hence makes ECC suitable to be adopted in wireless sensor networks. In the key management scheme for IP based sensor networks, we generate the public private key pair based on ECC for each individual sensor node. However the public key is not only dependent on the node's parameter but also the parameters of the network to which it belongs. This increases the security of the proposed solution and avoids intruders pretending to be authentic members of the network(s) by spreading their own public keys. In the last part of the thesis we consider Content Centric Networking (CCN) which is a new routing architecture for the internet of the future. Building on the observation that today's communications are more oriented towards content retrieval (web, P2P, etc.) than point-to-point communications (VoIP, IM, etc.), CCN proposes a radical revision of the Internet architecture switching from named hosts (TCP/IP protocols) to named data to best match its current usage. In a nutshell, content is addressable, routable, self-sufficient and authenticated, while locations no longer matter. Data is seen and identified directly by a routable name instead of a location (the address of the server). Consequently, data is directly requested at the network level not from its holder, hence there is no need for the DNS). To improve content diffusion, CCN relies on data distribution and duplication, because storage is cheaper than bandwidth: every content - particularly popular one - can be replicated and stored on any CCN node, even untrustworthy. People looking for particular content can securely retrieve it in a P2P-way from the best locations available. So far, there has been little investigation of the security of CCNs and there is no specific key management scheme for that. We propose an authentication and key establishment scheme for CCNs in which the contents are authenticated by the content generating node, using pre-distributed shares of encryption keys. The content requesting node can get those shares from any node in the network, even from malicious and intruder ones, in accordance with a key concept of CCNs. In our work we also provide means to protect the distributed shares from modification by these malicious/intruder nodes. The proposed scheme is again an online key generation approach but including a relation between the content and its encryption key. This dependency prevents the attackers from modifying the packet or the key share