WSEAS Transactions on Communications
Print ISSN: 1109-2742, E-ISSN: 2224-2864
Volume 15, 2016
Security Architecture for Wireless Sensors
Authors: ,
Abstract: As the potential range of applications for sensor networks expands, the need for security mechanisms grows. Security relevant problems are limited mostly to areas such as key distribution and cryptographic algorithms, due to severe resource constraints in wireless sensor networks. Even if it is not possible to cover all threats, a security architecture for sensor networks should provide mechanisms on several levels, in order to maximize the obstacles for attackers. This paper presents an architecture that provides basic security components for wireless sensor networks on multiple system levels. Since robust and strong security features require powerful nodes, the security architecture uses a heterogeneous sensor network. In addition to a large number of simple (cheap) sensor nodes providing the actual sensor tasks, there are a few powerful nodes (cluster nodes) that implement the required security features. The basic component of the architecture offers authenticated broadcasts to allow recipients to authenticate the sender of a message. On the basis of this basic component, our security architecture provides a key management, used for exchange of secret keys among nodes. In order to bind nodes to their neighborhood, keys and their owners are linked together. This ensures a certain grade of location relationship. To protect the sensor network against routing attacks, the security architecture includes a probabilistic multi-path routing protocol, which supports the key management and the authenticated broadcasts. The security system also provides functions to detect forged sensor data by verifying data reports en-route. In order to evaluate the efficiency of our security architecture, we simulated different sizes of sensor networks. Furthermore, the security architecture is successfully evaluated in a real test environment with two different kinds of sensor boards.
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Keywords: wireless sensor network, security architecture, key management, energy efficiency, multi-path routing, en-route filtering
Pages: 125-136
WSEAS Transactions on Communications, ISSN / E-ISSN: 1109-2742 / 2224-2864, Volume 15, 2016, Art. #16