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

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

A Survey of Access Control Models in Wireless Sensor Networks

Copyright 2014 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have attracted considerable interest in the research community, because of their wide range of applications. However, due to the distributed nature of WSNs and their deployment in remote areas, these networks are vulnerable to numerous security threats that can adversely affect their proper functioning. Resource constraints in sensor nodes mean that security mechanisms with a large overhead of computation and communication are impractical to use in WSNs; security in sensor networks is, therefore, a challenge. Access control is a critical security service that offers the appropriate access privileges to legitimate users and prevents illegitimate users from unauthorized access. However, access control has not received much attention in the context of WSNs. This paper provides an overview of security threats and attacks, outlines the security requirements and presents a state-of-the-art survey on access control models, including a comparison and evaluation based on their characteristics in WSNs. Potential challenging issues for access control schemes in WSNs are also discussed.Peer reviewe

A Study of IEEE 802.15.4 Security Framework for Wireless Body Area Network

A Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is a collection of low-power and lightweight wireless sensor nodes that are used to monitor the human body functions and the surrounding environment. It supports a number of innovative and interesting applications, including ubiquitous healthcare and Consumer Electronics (CE) applications. Since WBAN nodes are used to collect sensitive (life-critical) information and may operate in hostile environments, they require strict security mechanisms to prevent malicious interaction with the system. In this paper, we first highlight major security requirements and Denial of Service (DoS) attacks in WBAN at Physical, Medium Access Control (MAC), Network, and Transport layers. Then we discuss the IEEE 802.15.4 security framework and identify the security vulnerabilities and major attacks in the context of WBAN. Different types of attacks on the Contention Access Period (CAP) and Contention Free Period (CFP) parts of the superframe are analyzed and discussed. It is observed that a smart attacker can successfully corrupt an increasing number of GTS slots in the CFP period and can considerably affect the Quality of Service (QoS) in WBAN (since most of the data is carried in CFP period). As we increase the number of smart attackers the corrupted GTS slots are eventually increased, which prevents the legitimate nodes to utilize the bandwidth efficiently. This means that the direct adaptation of IEEE 802.15.4 security framework for WBAN is not totally secure for certain WBAN applications. New solutions are required to integrate high level security in WBAN.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures, 2 table

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