Secure and authenticated access to LLN resources through policy constraints

Ubiquitous devices comprising several resource-constrained sensors and actuators while having the long desired Internet connectivity, are becoming part of many solutions that seek to enhance user’s environment smartness and quality of living. Their intrinsic resource limitations however constitute critical requirements, such as security, a great challenge. When these nodes are associated with applications that might have an impact in user’s privacy or even become life threatening, the security issues are of primary concern. Access to these resources should be appropriately controlled to ensure that such wearable nodes are adequately protected. On the other hand, it is very important to not restrict access to only a very closed group of entities. This work presents a service oriented architecture that utilizes policy-based, unified, cross-platform and flexible access control to allow authenticated entities consume the services provided by wearable nodes while protecting their valuable resources

A family of key agreement mechanisms for mission critical communications for secure mobile ad hoc and wireless mesh internetworking

Future wireless networks like mobile ad hoc networks and wireless mesh networks are expected to play important role in demanding communications such as mission critical communications. MANETs are ideal for emergency cases where the communication infrastructure has been completely destroyed and there is a need for quick set up of communications among the rescue/emergency workers. In such emergency scenarios wireless mesh networks may be employed in a later phase for providing advanced communications and services acting as a backbone network in the affected area. Internetworking of both types of future networks will provide a broad range of mission critical applications. While offering many advantages, such as flexibility, easy of deployment and low cost, MANETs and mesh networks face important security and resilience threats, especially for such demanding applications. We introduce a family of key agreement methods based on weak to strong authentication associated with several multiparty contributory key establishment methods. We examine the attributes of each key establishment method and how each method can be better applied in different scenarios. The proposed protocols support seamlessly both types of networks and consider system and application requirements such as efficient and secure internetworking, dynamicity of network topologies and support of thin clients. © 2011 Ioannis G. Askoxylakis et al