Secured Clustering in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are being increasingly used in a wide variety of applications such as the environment, nuclear power plants, military and transportation, to name a few. These sensors are fragile devices, with minimal energy, storage and computational resources. The phenomenon that is sensed is relayed to a powerful base station for further analysis. A key issue in the design of communication protocols for wireless sensor networks is energy conservation. Another important criterion for sensor networks is security. This is particularly important in military applications and national infrastructure such as power plants and transportation systems. As far as we are aware, no protocols have been proposed for energy efficient secure communications. In previous work both security and energy efficiency have been considered separately in the design of protocols for sensor networks. In this thesis we propose a secure energy efficient communication protocol for wireless sensor networks. A clustered protocol based on "A key-management scheme for distributed sensor networks" proposed by V.D. Gligor is developed and simulated in this thesis. To further improve energy efficiency we apply the concept of a force to improve the coverage of the sensor nodes. The properties of our proposed algorithm have been analyzed. We propose in this thesis a secure scheme with clustering, a balanced secure scheme with clustering and finally a balanced clustered secure scheme after the application of force. Results show that the proposed balanced clustered secure scheme after the application of force provides the best energy efficiency as well as security. The secure scheme with no clustering gave the worst results.Computer Science Departmen

LEE: Light‐Weight Energy‐Efficient encryption algorithm for sensor networks

Data confidentiality in wireless sensor networks is mainly achieved by RC5 and Skipjack encryption algorithms. However, both algorithms have their weaknesses, for example RC5 supports variable-bit rotations, which are computationally expensive operations and Skipjack uses a key length of 80-bits, which is subject to brute force attack. In this paper we introduce a light-weight energy- fficient encryption-algorithm (LEE) for tiny embedded devices, such as sensor network nodes. We present experimental results of LEE under real sensor nodes operating in TinyOS. We also discuss the secrecy of our algorithm by presenting a security analysis of various tests and cryptanalytic attacks

On the vulnerabilities of voronoi-based approaches to mobile sensor deployment

Mobile sensor networks are the most promising solution to cover an Area of Interest (AoI) in safety critical scenarios. Mobile devices can coordinate with each other according to a distributed deployment algorithm, without resorting to human supervision for device positioning and network configuration. In this paper, we focus on the vulnerabilities of the deployment algorithms based on Voronoi diagrams to coordinate mobile sensors and guide their movements. We give a geometric characterization of possible attack configurations, proving that a simple attack consisting of a barrier of few compromised sensors can severely reduce network coverage. On the basis of the above characterization, we propose two new secure deployment algorithms, named SecureVor and Secure Swap Deployment (SSD). These algorithms allow a sensor to detect compromised nodes by analyzing their movements, under different and complementary operative settings. We show that the proposed algorithms are effective in defeating a barrier attack, and both have guaranteed termination. We perform extensive simulations to study the performance of the two algorithms and compare them with the original approach. Results show that SecureVor and SSD have better robustness and flexibility and excellent coverage capabilities and deployment time, even in the presence of an attac

Securing the Internet of Things Infrastructure - Standards and Techniques

The Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure is a conglomerate of electronic devices interconnected through the Internet, with the purpose of providing prompt and effective service to end-users. Applications running on an IoT infrastructure generally handle sensitive information such as a patient’s healthcare record, the position of a logistic vehicle, or the temperature readings obtained through wireless sensor nodes deployed in a bushland. The protection of such information from unlawful disclosure, tampering or modification, as well as the unscathed presence of IoT devices, in adversarial environments, is of prime concern. In this paper, a descriptive analysis of the security of standards and technologies for protecting the IoT communication channel from adversarial threats is provided. In addition, two paradigms for securing the IoT infrastructure, namely, common key based and paired key based, are proposed