1,480 research outputs found
Survey and Benchmark of Block Ciphers for Wireless Sensor Networks
Cryptographic algorithms play an important role in the security architecture of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Choosing the most storage- and energy-efficient block cipher is essential, due to the facts that these networks are meant to operate without human intervention for a long period of time with little energy supply, and that available storage is scarce on these sensor nodes. However, to our knowledge, no systematic work has been done in this area so far.We construct an evaluation framework in which we first identify the candidates of block ciphers suitable for WSNs, based on existing literature and authoritative recommendations. For evaluating and assessing these candidates, we not only consider the security properties but also the storage- and energy-efficiency of the candidates. Finally, based on the evaluation results, we select the most suitable ciphers for WSNs, namely Skipjack, MISTY1, and Rijndael, depending on the combination of available memory and required security (energy efficiency being implicit). In terms of operation mode, we recommend Output Feedback Mode for pairwise links but Cipher Block Chaining for group communications
Revisiting Shared Data Protection Against Key Exposure
This paper puts a new light on secure data storage inside distributed
systems. Specifically, it revisits computational secret sharing in a situation
where the encryption key is exposed to an attacker. It comes with several
contributions: First, it defines a security model for encryption schemes, where
we ask for additional resilience against exposure of the encryption key.
Precisely we ask for (1) indistinguishability of plaintexts under full
ciphertext knowledge, (2) indistinguishability for an adversary who learns: the
encryption key, plus all but one share of the ciphertext. (2) relaxes the
"all-or-nothing" property to a more realistic setting, where the ciphertext is
transformed into a number of shares, such that the adversary can't access one
of them. (1) asks that, unless the user's key is disclosed, noone else than the
user can retrieve information about the plaintext. Second, it introduces a new
computationally secure encryption-then-sharing scheme, that protects the data
in the previously defined attacker model. It consists in data encryption
followed by a linear transformation of the ciphertext, then its fragmentation
into shares, along with secret sharing of the randomness used for encryption.
The computational overhead in addition to data encryption is reduced by half
with respect to state of the art. Third, it provides for the first time
cryptographic proofs in this context of key exposure. It emphasizes that the
security of our scheme relies only on a simple cryptanalysis resilience
assumption for blockciphers in public key mode: indistinguishability from
random, of the sequence of diferentials of a random value. Fourth, it provides
an alternative scheme relying on the more theoretical random permutation model.
It consists in encrypting with sponge functions in duplex mode then, as before,
secret-sharing the randomness
Securing Internet of Things with Lightweight IPsec
Real-world deployments of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) require
secure communication. It is important that a receiver is able to verify that sensor
data was generated by trusted nodes. In some cases it may also be necessary
to encrypt sensor data in transit. Recently, WSNs and traditional IP networks
are more tightly integrated using IPv6 and 6LoWPAN. Available IPv6 protocol
stacks can use IPsec to secure data exchange. Thus, it is desirable to extend
6LoWPAN such that IPsec communication with IPv6 nodes is possible. It is
beneficial to use IPsec because the existing end-points on the Internet do not
need to be modified to communicate securely with the WSN. Moreover, using
IPsec, true end-to-end security is implemented and the need for a trustworthy
gateway is removed.
In this paper we provide End-to-End (E2E) secure communication between
an IP enabled sensor nodes and a device on traditional Internet. This is the
first compressed lightweight design, implementation, and evaluation of 6LoWPAN
extension for IPsec on Contiki. Our extension supports both IPsec's Authentication
Header (AH) and Encapsulation Security Payload (ESP). Thus,
communication endpoints are able to authenticate, encrypt and check the integrity
of messages using standardized and established IPv6 mechanisms
AES-CBC Software Execution Optimization
With the proliferation of high-speed wireless networking, the necessity for
efficient, robust and secure encryption modes is ever increasing. But,
cryptography is primarily a computationally intensive process. This paper
investigates the performance and efficiency of IEEE 802.11i approved Advanced
Encryption Standard (AES)-Rijndael ciphering/deciphering software in Cipher
Block Chaining (CBC) mode. Simulations are used to analyse the speed, resource
consumption and robustness of AES-CBC to investigate its viability for image
encryption usage on common low power devices. The detailed results presented in
this paper provide a basis for performance estimation of AES cryptosystems
implemented on wireless devices. The use of optimized AES-CBC software
implementation gives a superior encryption speed performance by 12 - 30%, but
at the cost of twice more memory for code size.Comment: 8 pages, IEEE 200
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