Abstract
Wireless sensor network applications range from industrial automation and control, agricultural and environmental protection, to surveillance and medicine. In most applications, data are highly sensitive and must be protected from any type of attack and abuse. Security challenges in wireless sensor networks are mainly defined by the power and computing resources of sensor devices, memory size, quality of radio channels and susceptibility to physical capture. In this article, an embedded sensor node microcontroller designed to support sensor network applications with severe security demands is presented. It features a low power 16-bitprocessor core supported by a number of hardware accelerators designed to perform complex operations required by advanced crypto algorithms. The microcontroller integrates an embedded Flash and an 8-channel 12-bit analog-to-digital converter making it a good solution for low-power sensor nodes. The article discusses the most important security topics in wireless sensor networks and presents the architecture of the proposed hardware solution. Furthermore, it gives details on the chip implementation, verification and hardware evaluation. Finally, the chip power dissipation and performance figures are estimated and analyzed.
Highlights
For many wireless sensor networks (WSN) in industrial, medical, and military applications, secure operation is mandatory [1]
We propose the solution which is a tailor-made sensor node microcontroller that provides the computational infrastructure for an efficient combination and implementation of advanced security algorithms based on symmetric and asymmetric cryptography
To the best of our knowledge, our chip is the first embedded sensor node microcontroller that combines a general-purpose microcontroller with hardware support for both public- and shared-key cryptography on a single chip. This approach provides a higher level of security along with reduced power dissipation comparing to the systems implementing symmetric-only ciphers suffering from the key agreement problem or those based on power-hungry 32-bit processors
Summary
For many wireless sensor networks (WSN) in industrial, medical, and military applications, secure operation is mandatory [1]. Jamming attacks launched by a powerful radio using frequency hopping can improve the network resilience [6], but these techniques require source are very hard to defend [5] Some techniques such as spread spectrum communication using substantial computational resources, which are not available in typical wireless sensor nodes. Possible attacks on the application layer attempt to overwhelm the network with a large number of sensor stimuli [20] or to inject spurious or replayed packets into the network at leaf nodes [21]. The goal of these attacks is to provoke increased traffic and starve network resources.
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