130 research outputs found

    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 embedded sensor node microcontroller with crypto-processors

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    Wireless sensor network applications range from industrial automation and control, agricultural and environmental protection, to surveillance and medicine. In most applications, data are highly sensitive and must be protected from any type of attack and abuse. Security challenges in wireless sensor networks are mainly defined by the power and computing resources of sensor devices, memory size, quality of radio channels and susceptibility to physical capture. In this article, an embedded sensor node microcontroller designed to support sensor network applications with severe security demands is presented. It features a low power 16-bitprocessor core supported by a number of hardware accelerators designed to perform complex operations required by advanced crypto algorithms. The microcontroller integrates an embedded Flash and an 8-channel 12-bit analog-to-digital converter making it a good solution for low-power sensor nodes. The article discusses the most important security topics in wireless sensor networks and presents the architecture of the proposed hardware solution. Furthermore, it gives details on the chip implementation, verification and hardware evaluation. Finally, the chip power dissipation and performance figures are estimated and analyzed

    Security of the Internet of Things: Vulnerabilities, Attacks and Countermeasures

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    Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) constitute one of the most promising third-millennium technologies and have wide range of applications in our surrounding environment. The reason behind the vast adoption of WSNs in various applications is that they have tremendously appealing features, e.g., low production cost, low installation cost, unattended network operation, autonomous and longtime operation. WSNs have started to merge with the Internet of Things (IoT) through the introduction of Internet access capability in sensor nodes and sensing ability in Internet-connected devices. Thereby, the IoT is providing access to huge amount of data, collected by the WSNs, over the Internet. Hence, the security of IoT should start with foremost securing WSNs ahead of the other components. However, owing to the absence of a physical line-of-defense, i.e., there is no dedicated infrastructure such as gateways to watch and observe the flowing information in the network, security of WSNs along with IoT is of a big concern to the scientific community. More specifically, for the application areas in which CIA (confidentiality, integrity, availability) has prime importance, WSNs and emerging IoT technology might constitute an open avenue for the attackers. Besides, recent integration and collaboration of WSNs with IoT will open new challenges and problems in terms of security. Hence, this would be a nightmare for the individuals using these systems as well as the security administrators who are managing those networks. Therefore, a detailed review of security attacks towards WSNs and IoT, along with the techniques for prevention, detection, and mitigation of those attacks are provided in this paper. In this text, attacks are categorized and treated into mainly two parts, most or all types of attacks towards WSNs and IoT are investigated under that umbrella: “Passive Attacks” and “Active Attacks”. Understanding these attacks and their associated defense mechanisms will help paving a secure path towards the proliferation and public acceptance of IoT technology

    Contributions to Securing Software Updates in IoT

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    The Internet of Things (IoT) is a large network of connected devices. In IoT, devices can communicate with each other or back-end systems to transfer data or perform assigned tasks. Communication protocols used in IoT depend on target applications but usually require low bandwidth. On the other hand, IoT devices are constrained, having limited resources, including memory, power, and computational resources. Considering these limitations in IoT environments, it is difficult to implement best security practices. Consequently, network attacks can threaten devices or the data they transfer. Thus it is crucial to react quickly to emerging vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities should be mitigated by firmware updates or other necessary updates securely. Since IoT devices usually connect to the network wirelessly, such updates can be performed Over-The-Air (OTA). This dissertation presents contributions to enable secure OTA software updates in IoT. In order to perform secure updates, vulnerabilities must first be identified and assessed. In this dissertation, first, we present our contribution to designing a maturity model for vulnerability handling. Next, we analyze and compare common communication protocols and security practices regarding energy consumption. Finally, we describe our designed lightweight protocol for OTA updates targeting constrained IoT devices. IoT devices and back-end systems often use incompatible protocols that are unable to interoperate securely. This dissertation also includes our contribution to designing a secure protocol translator for IoT. This translation is performed inside a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) with TLS interception. This dissertation also contains our contribution to key management and key distribution in IoT networks. In performing secure software updates, the IoT devices can be grouped since the updates target a large number of devices. Thus, prior to deploying updates, a group key needs to be established among group members. In this dissertation, we present our designed secure group key establishment scheme. Symmetric key cryptography can help to save IoT device resources at the cost of increased key management complexity. This trade-off can be improved by integrating IoT networks with cloud computing and Software Defined Networking (SDN).In this dissertation, we use SDN in cloud networks to provision symmetric keys efficiently and securely. These pieces together help software developers and maintainers identify vulnerabilities, provision secret keys, and perform lightweight secure OTA updates. Furthermore, they help devices and systems with incompatible protocols to be able to interoperate

    Sécurité collaborative pour l internet des objets

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    Cette thèse aborde des nouveaux défis de sécurité dans l'Internet des Objets (IdO). La transition actuelle de l'Internet classique vers l'Internet des Objets conduit à de nombreux changements dans les modèles de communications sous-jacents. La nature hétérogène des communications de l IdO et le déséquilibre entre les capacités des entités communicantes qui le constituent rendent difficile l'établissement de connexions sécurisées de bout en bout. Contrairement aux nœuds de l Internet traditionnel, la plupart des composants de l'Internet des Objets sont en effet caractérisés par de faibles capacités en termes d'énergie et de puissance calcul. Par conséquent, ils ne sont pas en mesure de supporter des systèmes de sécurité complexes. En particulier, la mise en place d'un canal de communication sécurisé de bout en bout nécessite l établissement d'une clé secrète commune entre les deux nœuds souhaitant communiquer, qui sera négociée en s'appuyant sur un protocole d'échange de clés tels que le Transport Layer Security (TLS) Handshake ou l Internet Key Exchange (IKE). Or, une utilisation directe de ces protocoles pour établir des connexions sécurisées entre deux entités de l IdO peut être difficile en raison de l'écart technologique entre celles-ci et des incohérences qui en résultent sur le plan des primitives cryptographiques supportées. Le sujet de l'adaptation des protocoles de sécurité existants pour répondre à ces nouveaux défis a récemment été soulevé dans la communauté scientifique. Cependant, les premières solutions proposées n'ont pas réussi à répondre aux besoins des nœuds à ressources limitées. Dans cette thèse, nous proposons de nouvelles approches collaboratives pour l'établissement de clés, dans le but de réduire les exigences des protocoles de sécurité existants, afin que ceux-ci puissent être mis en œuvre par des nœuds à ressources limitées. Nous avons particulièrement retenu les protocoles TLS Handshake, IKE et HIP BEX comme les meilleurs candidats correspondant aux exigences de sécurité de bout en bout pour l'IdO. Puis nous les avons modifiés de sorte que le nœud contraint en énergie puisse déléguer les opérations cryptographiques couteuses à un ensemble de nœuds au voisinage, tirant ainsi avantage de l'hétérogénéité spatiale qui caractérise l IdO. Nous avons entrepris des vérifications formelles de sécurité et des analyses de performance qui prouvent la sureté et l'efficacité énergétique des protocoles collaboratifs proposés. Dans une deuxième partie, nous avons porté notre attention sur une classe d attaques internes que la collaboration entre les nœuds peut induire et que les mécanismes cryptographiques classiques, tels que la signature et le chiffrement, s'avèrent impuissants à contrer. Cela nous a amené à introduire la notion de confiance au sein d'un groupe collaboratif. Le niveau de fiabilité d'un nœud est évalué par un mécanisme de sécurité dédié, connu sous le nom de système de gestion de confiance. Ce système est lui aussi instancié sur une base collaborative, dans laquelle plusieurs nœuds partagent leurs témoignages respectifs au sujet de la fiabilité des autres nœuds. En nous appuyant sur une analyse approfondie des systèmes de gestion de confiance existants et des contraintes de l IoD, nous avons conçu un système de gestion de confiance efficace pour nos protocoles collaboratifs. Cette efficacité a été évaluée en tenant compte de la façon dont le système de gestion de la confiance répond aux exigences spécifiques à nos approches proposées pour l'établissement de clés dans le contexte de l'IdO. Les résultats des analyses de performance que nous avons menées démontrent le bon fonctionnement du système proposé et une efficacité accrue par rapport à la littératureThis thesis addresses new security challenges in the Internet of Things (IoT). The current transition from legacy Internet to Internet of Things leads to multiple changes in its communication paradigms. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) initiated this transition by introducing unattended wireless topologies, mostly made of resource constrained nodes, in which radio spectrum therefore ceased to be the only resource worthy of optimization. Today's Machine to Machine (M2M) and Internet of Things architectures further accentuated this trend, not only by involving wider architectures but also by adding heterogeneity, resource capabilities inconstancy and autonomy to once uniform and deterministic systems. The heterogeneous nature of IoT communications and imbalance in resources capabilities between IoT entities make it challenging to provide the required end-to-end secured connections. Unlike Internet servers, most of IoT components are characterized by low capabilities in terms of both energy and computing resources, and thus, are unable to support complex security schemes. The setup of a secure end-to-end communication channel requires the establishment of a common secret key between both peers, which would be negotiated relying on standard security key exchange protocols such as Transport Layer Security (TLS) Handshake or Internet Key Exchange (IKE). Nevertheless, a direct use of existing key establishment protocols to initiate connections between two IoT entities may be impractical because of the technological gap between them and the resulting inconsistencies in their cryptographic primitives. The issue of adapting existing security protocols to fulfil these new challenges has recently been raised in the international research community but the first proposed solutions failed to satisfy the needs of resource-constrained nodes. In this thesis, we propose novel collaborative approaches for key establishment designed to reduce the requirements of existing security protocols, in order to be supported by resource-constrained devices. We particularly retained TLS handshake, Internet key Exchange and HIP BEX protocols as the best keying candidates fitting the end-to-end security requirements of the IoT. Then we redesigned them so that the constrained peer may delegate its heavy cryptographic load to less constrained nodes in neighbourhood exploiting the spatial heterogeneity of IoT nodes. Formal security verifications and performance analyses were also conducted to ensure the security effectiveness and energy efficiency of our collaborative protocols. However, allowing collaboration between nodes may open the way to a new class of threats, known as internal attacks that conventional cryptographic mechanisms fail to deal with. This introduces the concept of trustworthiness within a collaborative group. The trustworthiness level of a node has to be assessed by a dedicated security mechanism known as a trust management system. This system aims to track nodes behaviours to detect untrustworthy elements and select reliable ones for collaborative services assistance. In turn, a trust management system is instantiated on a collaborative basis, wherein multiple nodes share their evidences about one another's trustworthiness. Based on an extensive analysis of prior trust management systems, we have identified a set of best practices that provided us guidance to design an effective trust management system for our collaborative keying protocols. This effectiveness was assessed by considering how the trust management system could fulfil specific requirements of our proposed approaches for key establishment in the context of the IoT. Performance analysis results show the proper functioning and effectiveness of the proposed system as compared with its counterparts that exist in the literatureEVRY-INT (912282302) / SudocSudocFranceF

    Towards end-to-end security in internet of things based healthcare

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    Healthcare IoT systems are distinguished in that they are designed to serve human beings, which primarily raises the requirements of security, privacy, and reliability. Such systems have to provide real-time notifications and responses concerning the status of patients. Physicians, patients, and other caregivers demand a reliable system in which the results are accurate and timely, and the service is reliable and secure. To guarantee these requirements, the smart components in the system require a secure and efficient end-to-end communication method between the end-points (e.g., patients, caregivers, and medical sensors) of a healthcare IoT system. The main challenge faced by the existing security solutions is a lack of secure end-to-end communication. This thesis addresses this challenge by presenting a novel end-to-end security solution enabling end-points to securely and efficiently communicate with each other. The proposed solution meets the security requirements of a wide range of healthcare IoT systems while minimizing the overall hardware overhead of end-to-end communication. End-to-end communication is enabled by the holistic integration of the following contributions. The first contribution is the implementation of two architectures for remote monitoring of bio-signals. The first architecture is based on a low power IEEE 802.15.4 protocol known as ZigBee. It consists of a set of sensor nodes to read data from various medical sensors, process the data, and send them wirelessly over ZigBee to a server node. The second architecture implements on an IP-based wireless sensor network, using IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN). The system consists of a IEEE 802.11 based sensor module to access bio-signals from patients and send them over to a remote server. In both architectures, the server node collects the health data from several client nodes and updates a remote database. The remote webserver accesses the database and updates the webpage in real-time, which can be accessed remotely. The second contribution is a novel secure mutual authentication scheme for Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) implant systems. The proposed scheme relies on the elliptic curve cryptography and the D-Quark lightweight hash design. The scheme consists of three main phases: (1) reader authentication and verification, (2) tag identification, and (3) tag verification. We show that among the existing public-key crypto-systems, elliptic curve is the optimal choice due to its small key size as well as its efficiency in computations. The D-Quark lightweight hash design has been tailored for resource-constrained devices. The third contribution is proposing a low-latency and secure cryptographic keys generation approach based on Electrocardiogram (ECG) features. This is performed by taking advantage of the uniqueness and randomness properties of ECG's main features comprising of PR, RR, PP, QT, and ST intervals. This approach achieves low latency due to its reliance on reference-free ECG's main features that can be acquired in a short time. The approach is called Several ECG Features (SEF)-based cryptographic key generation. The fourth contribution is devising a novel secure and efficient end-to-end security scheme for mobility enabled healthcare IoT. The proposed scheme consists of: (1) a secure and efficient end-user authentication and authorization architecture based on the certificate based Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) handshake protocol, (2) a secure end-to-end communication method based on DTLS session resumption, and (3) support for robust mobility based on interconnected smart gateways in the fog layer. Finally, the fifth and the last contribution is the analysis of the performance of the state-of-the-art end-to-end security solutions in healthcare IoT systems including our end-to-end security solution. In this regard, we first identify and present the essential requirements of robust security solutions for healthcare IoT systems. We then analyze the performance of the state-of-the-art end-to-end security solutions (including our scheme) by developing a prototype healthcare IoT system

    Smart Wireless Sensor Networks

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    The recent development of communication and sensor technology results in the growth of a new attractive and challenging area - wireless sensor networks (WSNs). A wireless sensor network which consists of a large number of sensor nodes is deployed in environmental fields to serve various applications. Facilitated with the ability of wireless communication and intelligent computation, these nodes become smart sensors which do not only perceive ambient physical parameters but also be able to process information, cooperate with each other and self-organize into the network. These new features assist the sensor nodes as well as the network to operate more efficiently in terms of both data acquisition and energy consumption. Special purposes of the applications require design and operation of WSNs different from conventional networks such as the internet. The network design must take into account of the objectives of specific applications. The nature of deployed environment must be considered. The limited of sensor nodesďż˝ resources such as memory, computational ability, communication bandwidth and energy source are the challenges in network design. A smart wireless sensor network must be able to deal with these constraints as well as to guarantee the connectivity, coverage, reliability and security of network's operation for a maximized lifetime. This book discusses various aspects of designing such smart wireless sensor networks. Main topics includes: design methodologies, network protocols and algorithms, quality of service management, coverage optimization, time synchronization and security techniques for sensor networks
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