Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have recently gained popularity for a wide
spectrum of applications. Monitoring tasks can be performed in various
environments. This may be beneficial in many scenarios, but it certainly
exhibits new challenges in terms of security due to increased data
transmission over the wireless channel with potentially unknown threats. Among
possible security issues are timing attacks, which are not prevented by
traditional cryptographic security. Moreover, the limited energy and memory
resources prohibit the use of complex security mechanisms in such systems.
Therefore, balancing between security and the associated energy consumption
becomes a crucial challenge. This paper proposes a secure scheme for WSNs
while maintaining the requirement of the security-performance tradeoff. In
order to proceed to a quantitative treatment of this problem, a hybrid
continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) and queueing model are put forward, and
the tradeoff analysis of the security and performance attributes is carried
out. By extending and transforming this model, the mean time to security
attributes failure is evaluated. Through tradeoff analysis, we show that our
scheme can enhance the security of WSNs, and the optimal rekeying rate of the
performance and security tradeoff can be obtained. View Full-Tex