TKP: Three level key pre-distribution with mobile sinks for wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks are by its nature prone to various forms of security attacks. Authentication and secure communication have become the need of the day. Due to single point failure of a sink node or base station, mobile sinks are better in many wireless sensor networks applications for efficient data collection or aggregation, localized sensor reprogramming and for revoking compromised sensors. The existing sytems that make use of key predistribution schemes for pairwise key establishment between sensor nodes and mobile sinks, deploying mobile sinks for data collection has drawbacks. Here, an attacker can easily obtain many keys by capturing a few nodes and can gain control of the network by deploying a node preloaded with some compromised keys that will be the replica of compromised mobile sink. We propose an efficient three level key predistribution framework that uses any pairwise key predistribution in different levels. The new framework has two set of key pools one set of keys for the mobile sink nodes to access the sensor network and other set of keys for secure communication among the sensor nodes. It reduces the damage caused by mobile sink replication attack and stationary access node replication attack. To further reduce the communication time it uses a shortest distance to make pair between the nodes for comunication. Through results, we show that our security framework has a higher network resilience to a mobile sink replication attack as compared to the polynomial pool-based scheme with less communication tim

Security Schemes for Wireless Sensor Networks with Mobile Sink

Mobile sinks are vital in many wireless sensor applications for efficient data collection, data querying, and localized sensor reprogramming. Mobile sinks prolong the lifetime of a sensor network. However, when sensor networks with mobile sinks are deployed in a hostile environment, security became a critical issue. They become exposed to varieties of malicious attacks. Thus, anti threats schemes and security services, such as mobile sink?s authentication and pairwise key establishment, are essential components for the secure operation of such networks. Due to the sensors, limited resources designing efficient security schemes with low communication overhead to secure communication links between sensors and MS (Mobile Sink) is not a trivial task. In addition to the sensors limited resources, sink mobility required frequent exchange of cryptography information between the sensors and MS each time the MS updates its location which imposes extra communication overhead on the sensors. In this dissertation, we consider a number of security schemes for WSN (wireless sensor network) with MS. The schemes offer high network?s resiliency and low communication overhead against nodes capture, MS replication and wormhole attacks. We propose two schemes based on the polynomial pool scheme for tolerating nodes capture: the probabilistic generation key pre-distribution scheme combined with polynomial pool scheme, and the Q-composite generation key scheme combined with polynomial pool scheme. The schemes ensure low communication overhead and high resiliency. For anti MS replication attack scheme, we propose the multiple polynomial pools scheme that provide much higher resiliency to MS replication attack as compared to the single polynomial pool approach. Furthermore, to improve the network resiliency against wormhole attack, two defensive mechanisms were developed according to the MS mobility type. In the first technique, MS uses controlled mobility. We investigate the problem of using a single authentication code by sensors network to verify the source of MS beacons, and then we develop a defensive approach that divide the sensor network into different authentication code?s grids. In the second technique, random mobility is used by MS. We explore the use of different communication channels available in the sensor hardware combined with polynomial pool scheme

KALwEN+: Practical Key Management Schemes for Gossip-Based Wireless Medical Sensor Networks

The constrained resources of sensors restrict the design of a key management scheme for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this work, we first formalize the security model of ALwEN, which is a gossip-based wireless medical sensor network (WMSN) for ambient assisted living. Our security model considers the node capture, the gossip-based network and the revocation problems, which should be valuable for ALwEN-like applications. Based on Shamir's secret sharing technique, we then propose two key management schemes for ALwEN, namely the KALwEN+ schemes, which are proven with the security properties defined in the security model. The KALwEN+ schemes not only fit ALwEN, but also can be tailored to other scalable wireless sensor networks based on gossiping

BANZKP: a Secure Authentication Scheme Using Zero Knowledge Proof for WBANs

-Wireless body area network(WBAN) has shown great potential in improving healthcare quality not only for patients but also for medical staff. However, security and privacy are still an important issue in WBANs especially in multi-hop architectures. In this paper, we propose and present the design and the evaluation of a secure lightweight and energy efficient authentication scheme BANZKP based on an efficient cryptographic protocol, Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) and a commitment scheme. ZKP is used to confirm the identify of the sensor nodes, with small computational requirement, which is favorable for body sensors given their limited resources, while the commitment scheme is used to deal with replay attacks and hence the injection attacks by committing a message and revealing the key later. Our scheme reduces the memory requirement by 56.13 % compared to TinyZKP [13], the comparable alternative so far for Body Area Networks, and uses 10 % less energy

An Energy Aware and Secure MAC Protocol for Tackling Denial of Sleep Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks which form part of the core for the Internet of Things consist of resource constrained sensors that are usually powered by batteries. Therefore, careful energy awareness is essential when working with these devices. Indeed,the introduction of security techniques such as authentication and encryption, to ensure confidentiality and integrity of data, can place higher energy load on the sensors. However, the absence of security protection c ould give room for energy drain attacks such as denial of sleep attacks which have a higher negative impact on the life span ( of the sensors than the presence of security features. This thesis, therefore, focuses on tackling denial of sleep attacks from two perspectives A security perspective and an energy efficiency perspective. The security perspective involves evaluating and ranking a number of security based techniques to curbing denial of sleep attacks. The energy efficiency perspective, on the other hand, involves exploring duty cycling and simulating three Media Access Control ( protocols Sensor MAC, Timeout MAC andTunableMAC under different network sizes and measuring different parameters such as the Received Signal Strength RSSI) and Link Quality Indicator ( Transmit power, throughput and energy efficiency Duty cycling happens to be one of the major techniques for conserving energy in wireless sensor networks and this research aims to answer questions with regards to the effect of duty cycles on the energy efficiency as well as the throughput of three duty cycle protocols Sensor MAC ( Timeout MAC ( and TunableMAC in addition to creating a novel MAC protocol that is also more resilient to denial of sleep a ttacks than existing protocols. The main contributions to knowledge from this thesis are the developed framework used for evaluation of existing denial of sleep attack solutions and the algorithms which fuel the other contribution to knowledge a newly developed protocol tested on the Castalia Simulator on the OMNET++ platform. The new protocol has been compared with existing protocols and has been found to have significant improvement in energy efficiency and also better resilience to denial of sleep at tacks Part of this research has been published Two conference publications in IEEE Explore and one workshop paper

PluralisMAC: a generic multi-MAC framework for heterogeneous, multiservice wireless networks, applied to smart containers

Developing energy-efficient MAC protocols for lightweight wireless systems has been a challenging task for decades because of the specific requirements of various applications and the varying environments in which wireless systems are deployed. Many MAC protocols for wireless networks have been proposed, often custom-made for a specific application. It is clear that one MAC does not fit all the requirements. So, how should a MAC layer deal with an application that has several modes (each with different requirements) or with the deployment of another application during the lifetime of the system? Especially in a mobile wireless system, like Smart Monitoring of Containers, we cannot know in advance the application state (empty container versus stuffed container). Dynamic switching between different energy-efficient MAC strategies is needed. Our architecture, called PluralisMAC, contains a generic multi-MAC framework and a generic neighbour monitoring and filtering framework. To validate the real-world feasibility of our architecture, we have implemented it in TinyOS and have done experiments on the TMote Sky nodes in the w-iLab.t testbed. Experimental results show that dynamic switching between MAC strategies is possible with minimal receive chain overhead, while meeting the various application requirements (reliability and low-energy consumption)

BAN-GZKP: Optimal Zero Knowledge Proof based Scheme for Wireless Body Area Networks

BANZKP is the best to date Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) based secure lightweight and energy efficient authentication scheme designed for Wireless Area Network (WBAN). It is vulnerable to several security attacks such as the replay attack, Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks at sink and redundancy information crack. However, BANZKP needs an end-to-end authentication which is not compliant with the human body postural mobility. We propose a new scheme BAN-GZKP. Our scheme improves both the security and postural mobility resilience of BANZKP. Moreover, BAN-GZKP uses only a three-phase authentication which is optimal in the class of ZKP protocols. To fix the security vulnerabilities of BANZKP, BAN-GZKP uses a novel random key allocation and a Hop-by-Hop authentication definition. We further prove the reliability of our scheme to various attacks including those to which BANZKP is vulnerable. Furthermore, via extensive simulations we prove that our scheme, BAN-GZKP, outperforms BANZKP in terms of reliability to human body postural mobility for various network parameters (end-to-end delay, number of packets exchanged in the network, number of transmissions). We compared both schemes using representative convergecast strategies with various transmission rates and human postural mobility. Finally, it is important to mention that BAN-GZKP has no additional cost compared to BANZKP in terms memory, computational complexity or energy consumption

Security in Wireless Sensor Networks: Issues and Challenges

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is an emerging technology that shows great promise for various futuristic applications both for mass public and military. The sensing technology combined with processing power and wireless communication makes it lucrative for being exploited in abundance in future. The inclusion of wireless communication technology also incurs various types of security threats. The intent of this paper is to investigate the security related issues and challenges in wireless sensor networks. We identify the security threats, review proposed security mechanisms for wireless sensor networks. We also discuss the holistic view of security for ensuring layered and robust security in wireless sensor networks.Comment: 6 page

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