A PKC-Based Node Revocation Scheme in Wireless Sensor Networks

[[abstract]]Generally deployed in an unattended environment, a sensor network can be easily assaulted or compromised by adversaries. Network security becomes a major problem. A distributed node revocation scheme is effective in reducing the damages a compromised node may cause to a sensor network, but its operation tends to consume large-scale memory space of the hardware-constrained sensor nodes. To reduce such complexity, this paper presents a new distributed voting revocation scheme based on the one-way hash chain, the concept of threshold secret sharing, the certificate revocation list and the public-key cryptography.[[conferencetype]]國際[[conferencedate]]20071206~20071208[[iscallforpapers]]Y[[conferencelocation]]Jeju, Kore

Factors Impacting Key Management Effectiveness in Secured Wireless Networks

The use of a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) offers a cryptographic solution that can overcome many, but not all, of the MANET security problems. One of the most critical aspects of a PKI system is how well it implements Key Management. Key Management deals with key generation, key storage, key distribution, key updating, key revocation, and certificate service in accordance with security policies over the lifecycle of the cryptography. The approach supported by traditional PKI works well in fixed wired networks, but it may not appropriate for MANET due to the lack of fixed infrastructure to support the PKI. This research seeks to identify best practices in securing networks which may be applied to new network architectures

Segurança em redes de sensores wireless

Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores (Major de Telecomunicações). Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200

Stealthy attacks and defense strategies in competing sensor networks

The fundamental objective of sensor networks underpinning a variety of applications is the collection of reliable information from the surrounding environment. The correctness of the collected data is especially important in applications involving societal welfare and safety, in which the acquired information may be utilized by end-users for decision-making. The distributed nature of sensor networks and their deployment in unattended and potentially hostile environments, however, renders this collection task challenging for both scalar and visual data. In this work we propose and address the twin problem of carrying out and defending against a stealthy attack on the information gathered by a sensor network at the physical sensing layer as perpetrated by a competing hostile network. A stealthy attack in this context is an intelligent attempt to disinform a sensor network in a manner that mitigates attack discovery. In comparison with previous sensor network security studies, we explicitly model the attack scenario as an active competition between two networks where difficulties arise from the pervasive nature of the attack, the possibility of tampering during data acquisition prior to encryption, and the lack of prior knowledge regarding the characteristics of the attack. We examine the problem from the perspective of both the hostile and the legitimate network. The interaction between the networks is modeled as a game where a stealth utility is derived and shown to be consistent for both players in the case of stealthy direct attacks and stealthy cross attacks. Based on the stealth utility, the optimal attack and defense strategies are obtained for each network. For the legitimate network, minimization of the attacker’s stealth results in the possibility of attack detection through established paradigms and the ability to mitigate the power of the attack. For the hostile network, maximization of the stealth utility translates into the optimal attack avoidance. This attack avoidance does not require active communication among the hostile nodes but rather relies on a level of coordination which we quantify. We demonstrate the significance and effectiveness of the solution for sensor networks acquiring scalar and multidimensional data such as surveillance sequences and relate the results to existing image sensor networks. Finally we discuss the implications of these results for achieving secure event acquisition in unattended environments

Scalable cryptographic key management in wireless sensor networks

We propose a scalable key management scheme for sensor networks consisting of a large-scale random deployment of commodity sensor nodes that are anonymous. The proposed scheme relies on a locationbased virtual network infrastructure and is built upon a combinatorial formulation of the group key management problem. Primary features of our scheme include autonomously computing group keys, and dynamically computing, using a simple hash function, the mapping of nodes to group keys. The scheme scales well in the size of the network and supports dynamic setup and management of arbitrary structures of secure group communications in large-scale wireless sensor network