An Authentication and Key Establishment Scheme for the IP-Based Wireless Sensor Networks

Integration between wireless sensor networks and traditional IP networks using the IPv6 and 6LoWPAN standards is a very active research and application area. A combination of hybrid network significantly increases the complexity of addressing connectivity and fault tolerance problems in a highly heterogeneous environment, including for example different packet sizes in different networks. In such challenging conditions, securing the communication between nodes with very diverse computational, memory and energy storage resources is at the same time an essential requirement and a very complex issue. In this paper we present an efficient and secure mutual authentication and key establishment protocol based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) by which different classes of nodes, with very different capabilities, can authenticate each other and establish a secret key for secure communication. The analysis of the proposed scheme shows that it provides good network connectivity and resilience against some well known attacks

An integrated security Protocol communication scheme for Internet of Things using the Locator/ID Separation Protocol Network

Internet of Things communication is mainly based on a machine-to-machine pattern, where devices are globally addressed and identified. However, as the number of connected devices increase, the burdens on the network infrastructure increase as well. The major challenges are the size of the routing tables and the efficiency of the current routing protocols in the Internet backbone. To address these problems, an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working group, along with the research group at Cisco, are still working on the Locator/ID Separation Protocol as a routing architecture that can provide new semantics for the IP addressing, to simplify routing operations and improve scalability in the future of the Internet such as the Internet of Things. Nonetheless, The Locator/ID Separation Protocol is still at an early stage of implementation and the security Protocol e.g. Internet Protocol Security (IPSec), in particular, is still in its infancy. Based on this, three scenarios were considered: Firstly, in the initial stage, each Locator/ID Separation Protocol-capable router needs to register with a Map-Server. This is known as the Registration Stage. Nevertheless, this stage is vulnerable to masquerading and content poisoning attacks. Secondly, the addresses resolving stage, in the Locator/ID Separation Protocol the Map Server (MS) accepts Map-Request from Ingress Tunnel Routers and Egress Tunnel Routers. These routers in trun look up the database and return the requested mapping to the endpoint user. However, this stage lacks data confidentiality and mutual authentication. Furthermore, the Locator/ID Separation Protocol limits the efficiency of the security protocol which works against redirecting the data or acting as fake routers. Thirdly, As a result of the vast increase in the different Internet of Things devices, the interconnected links between these devices increase vastly as well. Thus, the communication between the devices can be easily exposed to disclosures by attackers such as Man in the Middle Attacks (MitM) and Denial of Service Attack (DoS). This research provided a comprehensive study for Communication and Mobility in the Internet of Things as well as the taxonomy of different security protocols. It went on to investigate the security threats and vulnerabilities of Locator/ID Separation Protocol using X.805 framework standard. Then three Security protocols were provided to secure the exchanged transitions of communication in Locator/ID Separation Protocol. The first security protocol had been implemented to secure the Registration stage of Locator/ID separation using ID/Based cryptography method. The second security protocol was implemented to address the Resolving stage in the Locator/ID Separation Protocol between the Ingress Tunnel Router and Egress Tunnel Router using Challenge-Response authentication and Key Agreement technique. Where, the third security protocol had been proposed, analysed and evaluated for the Internet of Things communication devices. This protocol was based on the authentication and the group key agreement via using the El-Gamal concept. The developed protocols set an interface between each level of the phase to achieve security refinement architecture to Internet of Things based on Locator/ID Separation Protocol. These protocols were verified using Automated Validation Internet Security Protocol and Applications (AVISPA) which is a push button tool for the automated validation of security protocols and achieved results demonstrating that they do not have any security flaws. Finally, a performance analysis of security refinement protocol analysis and an evaluation were conducted using Contiki and Cooja simulation tool. The results of the performance analysis showed that the security refinement was highly scalable and the memory was quite efficient as it needed only 72 bytes of memory to store the keys in the Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) device

Integrated Framework For Mobile Low Power IoT Devices

Ubiquitous object networking has sparked the concept of the Internet of Things (IoT) which defines a new era in the world of networking. The IoT principle can be addressed as one of the important strategic technologies that will positively influence the humans’ life. All the gadgets, appliances and sensors around the world will be connected together to form a smart environment, where all the entities that connected to the Internet can seamlessly share data and resources. The IoT vision allows the embedded devices, e.g. sensor nodes, to be IP-enabled nodes and interconnect with the Internet. The demand for such technique is to make these embedded nodes act as IP-based devices that communicate directly with other IP networks without unnecessary overhead and to feasibly utilize the existing infrastructure built for the Internet. In addition, controlling and monitoring these nodes is maintainable through exploiting the existed tools that already have been developed for the Internet. Exchanging the sensory measurements through the Internet with several end points in the world facilitates achieving the concept of smart environment. Realization of IoT concept needs to be addressed by standardization efforts that will shape the infrastructure of the networks. This has been achieved through the IEEE 802.15.4, 6LoWPAN and IPv6 standards. The bright side of this new technology is faced by several implications since the IoT introduces a new class of security issues, such as each node within the network is considered as a point of vulnerability where an attacker can utilize to add malicious code via accessing the nodes through the Internet or by compromising a node. On the other hand, several IoT applications comprise mobile nodes that is in turn brings new challenges to the research community due to the effect of the node mobility on the network management and performance. Another defect that degrades the network performance is the initialization stage after the node deployment step by which the nodes will be organized into the network. The recent IEEE 802.15.4 has several structural drawbacks that need to be optimized in order to efficiently fulfil the requirements of low power mobile IoT devices. This thesis addresses the aforementioned three issues, network initialization, node mobility and security management. In addition, the related literature is examined to define the set of current issues and to define the set of objectives based upon this. The first contribution is defining a new strategy to initialize the nodes into the network based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. A novel mesh-under cluster-based approach is proposed and implemented that efficiently initializes the nodes into clusters and achieves three objectives: low initialization cost, shortest path to the sink node, low operational cost (data forwarding). The second contribution is investigating the mobility issue within the IoT media access control (MAC) infrastructure and determining the related problems and requirements. Based on this, a novel mobility scheme is presented that facilitates node movement inside the network under the IEEE 802.15.4e time slotted channel hopping (TSCH) mode. The proposed model mitigates the problem of frequency channel hopping and slotframe issue in the TSCH mode. The next contribution in this thesis is determining the mobility impact on low latency deterministic (LLDN) network. One of the significant issues of mobility is increasing the latency and degrading packet delivery ratio (PDR). Accordingly, a novel mobility protocol is presented to tackle the mobility issue in LLDN mode and to improve network performance and lessen impact of node movement. The final contribution in this thesis is devising a new key bootstrapping scheme that fits both IEEE 802.15.4 and 6LoWPAN neighbour discovery architectures. The proposed scheme permits a group of nodes to establish the required link keys without excessive communication/computational overhead. Additionally, the scheme supports the mobile node association process by ensuring secure access control to the network and validates mobile node authenticity in order to eliminate any malicious node association. The purposed key management scheme facilitates the replacement of outdated master network keys and release the required master key in a secure manner. Finally, a modified IEEE 802.15.4 link-layer security structure is presented. The modified architecture minimizes both energy consumption and latency incurred through providing authentication/confidentiality services via the IEEE 802.15.4