A secure communication framework for wireless sensor networks

Today, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are no longer a nascent technology and future networks, especially Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) will integrate more sensor-based systems into a variety of application scenarios. Typical application areas include medical, environmental, military, and commercial enterprises. Providing security to this diverse set of sensor-based applications is necessary for the healthy operations of the overall system because untrusted entities may target the proper functioning of applications and disturb the critical decision-making processes by injecting false information into the network. One way to address this issue is to employ en-route-filtering-based solutions utilizing keys generated by either static or dynamic key management schemes in the WSN literature. However, current schemes are complicated for resource-constrained sensors as they utilize many keys and more importantly as they transmit many keying messages in the network, which increases the energy consumption of WSNs that are already severely limited in the technical capabilities and resources (i.e., power, computational capacities, and memory) available to them. Nonetheless, further improvements without too much overhead are still possible by sharing a dynamically created cryptic credential. Building upon this idea, the purpose of this thesis is to introduce an efficient and secure communication framework for WSNs. Specifically, three protocols are suggested as contributions using virtual energies and local times onboard the sensors as dynamic cryptic credentials: (1) Virtual Energy-Based Encryption and Keying (VEBEK); (2) TIme-Based DynamiC Keying and En-Route Filtering (TICK); (3) Secure Source-Based Loose Time Synchronization (SOBAS) for WSNs.Ph.D.Committee Chair: Copeland, John; Committee Co-Chair: Beyah, Raheem; Committee Member: Li, Geoffrey; Committee Member: Owen, Henry; Committee Member: Zegura, Ellen; Committee Member: Zhang, Fumi

BHnFDIA: Energy Efficient Elimination of Black Hole and False Data Injection Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are currently being used in a wide range of applications including military areas that demand high security requirements. WSNs are susceptible to various types of attacks as they are unsupervised in nature. Since sensor network is highly resource constrained, providing security to data transmission becomes a challenging issue. Attacks must be detected and eliminated from the network as early as possible to enhance the rate of successful transmissions. In this paper, an energy efficient algorithm is proposed to eliminate Black Hole and False Data Injection Attack (BHnFDIA) to overcome black hole attack in WSNs using a new acknowledgement based scheme with less overhead. Every intermediate node check the authenticity and integrity of the received packet. The authentic packets will be forwarded and malicious packets will be discarded immediately. The proposed scheme can eliminate false data injection by outside malicious nodes and Black hole attack by compromised insider nodes. Simulation results show that the scheme can successfully identify and eliminate 100% black hole nodes. Malicious packets are immediately removed with 100% filtering efficiency. The scheme ensures more than 99% packet delivery with increased network traffic

Smart Wireless Sensor Networks

The recent development of communication and sensor technology results in the growth of a new attractive and challenging area - wireless sensor networks (WSNs). A wireless sensor network which consists of a large number of sensor nodes is deployed in environmental fields to serve various applications. Facilitated with the ability of wireless communication and intelligent computation, these nodes become smart sensors which do not only perceive ambient physical parameters but also be able to process information, cooperate with each other and self-organize into the network. These new features assist the sensor nodes as well as the network to operate more efficiently in terms of both data acquisition and energy consumption. Special purposes of the applications require design and operation of WSNs different from conventional networks such as the internet. The network design must take into account of the objectives of specific applications. The nature of deployed environment must be considered. The limited of sensor nodes� resources such as memory, computational ability, communication bandwidth and energy source are the challenges in network design. A smart wireless sensor network must be able to deal with these constraints as well as to guarantee the connectivity, coverage, reliability and security of network's operation for a maximized lifetime. This book discusses various aspects of designing such smart wireless sensor networks. Main topics includes: design methodologies, network protocols and algorithms, quality of service management, coverage optimization, time synchronization and security techniques for sensor networks

On the use of IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee as federating communication protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

Tese de mestrado. Redes e Serviços de Comunicação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto, Instituto Superior de Engenharia. 200

Issues Related to Network Security

As wireless technologies are becoming increasingly easier and cheaper to use, the frequency with which they are implemented in networks is also rising. There are many issues related to wireless technology and its security that are affecting these networks. The security solutions available are not always implemented properly and/or users are simply unaware of the security risks involved. In this project I will discuss about the wireless technologies available, equipment need to install, cost involved to create a small wireless network used in offices and home. Then I will be discussing various security issue related to the network, types of solutions available in market and cost effectiveness of the solution for our small network. Then I will be using some tools available like GFI LANgaurd Network Security Scanner 6.0 to test our network and other network available on our campus. This tools are used to check whether wireless/LAN networks are vulnerable to attacks, are the network open to the public. Finally a full report of the network will be generated and will be use to secure the network for the loop holes that can be easy attacked from the outside world, thus providing additional security to the network

Cluster based jamming and countermeasures for wireless sensor network MAC protocols

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a collection of wireless nodes, usually with limited computing resources and available energy. The medium access control layer (MAC layer) directly guides the radio hardware and manages access to the radio spectrum in controlled way. A top priority for a WSN MAC protocol is to conserve energy, however tailoring the algorithm for this purpose can create or expose a number of security vulnerabilities. In particular, a regular duty cycle makes a node vulnerable to periodic jamming attacks. This vulnerability limits the use of use of a WSN in applications requiring high levels of security. We present a new WSN MAC protocol, RSMAC (Random Sleep MAC) that is designed to provide resistance to periodic jamming attacks while maintaining elements that are essential to WSN functionality. CPU, memory and especially radio usage are kept to a minimum to conserve energy while maintaining an acceptable level of network performance so that applications can be run transparently on top of the secure MAC layer. We use a coordinated yet pseudo-random duty cycle that is loosely synchronized across the entire network via a distributed algorithm. This thwarts an attacker\u27s ability to predict when nodes will be awake and likewise thwarts energy efficient intelligent jamming attacks by reducing their effectiveness and energy-efficiency to that of non-intelligent attacks. Implementing the random duty cycle requires additional energy usage, but also offers an opportunity to reduce asymmetric energy use and eliminate energy use lost to explicit neighbor discovery. We perform testing of RSMAC against non-secure protocols in a novel simulator that we designed to make prototyping new WSN algorithms efficient, informative and consistent. First we perform tests of the existing SMAC protocol to demonstrate the relevance of the novel simulation for estimating energy usage, data transmission rates, MAC timing and other relevant macro characteristics of wireless sensor networks. Second, we use the simulation to perform detailed testing of RSMAC that demonstrates its performance characteristics with different configurations and its effectiveness in confounding intelligent jammers

Wake-up radio systems : design, development, performance evaluation and comparison to conventional medium access control protocols for wireless sensor networks

During the recent years, the research related to Wake-up Radio (WuR) systems has gained noticeable interest. In WuR systems, a node initiating a communication first sends a Wake-up Call (WuC) by means of its Wake-up Transmitter (WuTx), to the Wake-up Receiver (WuRx) of a remote node to activate it in an on-demand manner. Until the reception of the WuC, the node's MCU and main data transceiver are in sleep mode. Hence, WuR drastically reduce the power required by wireless nodes. This thesis provides a complete analysis of several WuR designs vs. conventional MAC protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). The research is performed in an incremental fashion and includes hardware, softwar and simulation topics. WuR systems enable energy savings in plenty of different applications, e.g., retrieving information from environmental pollution sensors placed in a city by a mobile collector node, or activating a sleeping wireless AP. They are easy to program in and provide implicit synchronization. However, achieving a good WuRx design may become a challenge because power amplifiers cannot be used for the sake of energy. The system proposed in chapter 2 is a successful WuR system prototype. The so-called SµA-WuRx is less complex than commercial WuR systems, it is cheaper from the monetary point of view, requires several times less energy and allows for up to 15 meters of communication, an adequate value for WuR systems. However, the system can be improved by including several desirable features, such as longer operational ranges and/or addressing mechanisms. The so-called Time-Knocking (TicK) addressing strategy, analyzed in chapter 3, enables energy efficient node addressing by varying the time between WuCs received by a MCU. TicK allows for variable length addresses and multicast. A WuR system may not fit any possible application. Thus, while the SµA-WuRx and TicK efficiently solved many of the requirements of single-hop and data-collector applications, they lack of flexibility. Instead, SCM-WuR systems in chapter 4 feature an outstanding trade-off between hardware complexity, current consumption and operational range, and even enable multi-hop wake-up for long remote sensor measure collection. To contextualize the WuR systems developed, chapter 5 provides an overview of the most important WuR systems as of 2014. Developing a MAC protocol which performs acceptably in a wide range of diverse applications is a very difficult task. Comparatively, SCM-WuR systems perform properly in all the use cases (single and multi-hop) presented in chapter 6. Bluetooth Low Energy, or BLE, appears as a duty-cycled MAC protocol mainly targeting single-hop applications. Because of its clearly defined use cases and its integration with its upper application layers, BLE appears as an extremely energy-efficient protocol that cannot be easily replaced by WuR. Because of all these aspects, the performance of BLE is analyzed in chapter 7. Finally, chapter 8 tries to solve one of the issues affecting WuR systems, that is, the need for extra hardware. While this issue seems difficult to solve for WuRx, the chapter provides ideas to use IEEE 802.11-enabled devices as WuTx.Durant els últims anys, la investigació relativa als sistemes de Ràdios de Wake-up (de l'anglès Wake-up Radio, WuR) ha experimentat un interès notable. En aquests sistemes, un node inicia la comunicació inal.làmbrica transmetent una Wake-up Call (WuC), per mitjà del seu transmissor de Wake-up (WuTx), dirigida al receptor de Wake-up (WuRx) del node remot. Aquesta WuC activa el node remot, el microcontrolador (MCU) i la ràdio principals del qual han pogut romandre en mode "sleep" fins el moment. Així doncs, els sistemes WuR permeten un estalvi dràstic de l'energia requerida pels nodes sense fils. Aquesta tesi proposa diferents sistemes WuR i els compara amb protocols MAC existents per a xarxes de sensors sense fils (Wireless Sensor Networks, WSN). La investigació es realitza de forma progressiva i inclou hardware, software i simulació. Els sistemes WuR permeten un estalvi energètic notable en moltes aplicacions: recol¿lecció d'informació ambiental, activació remota de punts d'accés wi-fi, etc. Són fàcils de programar en software i comporten una sincronització implícita entre nodes. Malauradament, un consum energètic mínim impossibilita l'ús d'amplificadors de potència, i dissenyar-los esdevé un repte. El sistema presentat en el capítol 2 és un prototip exitós de sistema WuR. De nom SµA-WuR, és més senzill que alternatives comercials, és més econòmic, requereix menys energia i permet distàncies de comunicació WuR majors, de fins a 15 metres. L'estratègia d'adreçament Time-KnocKing, presentada en el capítol 3, permet dotar l'anterior SµA-WuR d'una forma d'especificar el node adreçat, permetent estalvi energètic a nivell de xarxa. TicK opera codificant el temps entre diferents WuC. Depenent del temps entre intervals, es desperten el/s node/s desitjats d'una forma extremadament eficient. Tot i els seus beneficis, hi ha aplicacions no implementables amb el sistema SµA-WuR. Per a aquest motiu, en el capítol 4 es presenta el sistema SCM-WuR, que ofereix un rang d'operació de 40 a 100 metres a canvi d'una mínima complexitat hardware afegida. SCM-WuR cobreix el ventall d'aplicacions del sistema SµA-WuRx, i també les que requereixen multi-hop a nivell WuR. El capítol 5 de la tesi compara els dos sistemes WuR anteriors vers les propostes més importants fins el 2014. El capítol 6 inclou un framework de simulació complet amb les bases per a substituir els sistemes basats en duty-cycling a WuR. Degut a que desenvolupar un protocol MAC que operi acceptablement bé en multitud d'aplicacions esdevé una tasca pràcticament impossible, els sistemes WuR presentats amb anterioritat i modelats en aquest capítol representen una solució versàtil, interessant i molt més eficient des del punt de vista energètic. Bluetooth Low Energy, o Smart, o BLE, representa un cas d'aplicació específica on, degut a la gran integració a nivell d'aplicació, la substitució per sistemes de WuR esdevé difícil Per a aquesta raó, i degut a que es tracta d'un protocol MAC extremadament eficient energèticament, aquesta tesi conté una caracterització completa de BLE en el capítol 7. Finalment, el capítol 8 soluciona un dels inconvenients del sistemes WuR, el disseny de WuTx específics, presentant una estratègia per a transformar qualsevol dispositiu IEEE 802.11 en WuTx

Neighbor Discovery Proxy-Gateway for 6LoWPAN-based Wireless Sensor Networks

El propósito de este trabajo es el estudio de métodos para la interconexión de redes personales inalámbricas de área local de bajo consumo y redes de computadores tradicionales. En particular, este proyecto analiza los protocolos de red involucrados así como las posibles formas de interoperabilidad entre ellos, teniendo como meta la integración de redes inalámbricas de sensores IEEE 802.15.4 basadas en 6LoWPAN (una capa de adaptación que hace posible el transporte de paquetes IPv6 sobre IEEE 802.15.4) en redes Ethernet ya existentes, sin necesidad de cambios en la infraestructura de red. Dicha integración permitiría el desarrollo y expansión de aplicaciones de usuario utilizando la tradicional pila de protocolos TCP/IP en sistemas compuestos por dispositivos empotrados de bajo coste y bajo consumo. Para probar la viabilidad de los métodos desarrollados, se diseña, implementa y evalúa un sistema empotrado cuya función es llevar a cabo las tareas de integración descritas

Personal area networks (PAN) : near-field intra-body communication

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Media Arts & Sciences, 1995.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 80-81).by Thomas Guthrie Zimmerman.M.S