Chip-based asymmetric key generation in hierarchical wireless sensors networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) gives the loaded advantages of ad hoc and flexible network deployments in an uncontrolled environments. Revealing of any information communicated is not desirable in any mission critical applications. There are methods to provide securities for these applications by implementing cryptographic methods. However due to their resource constraint nature, public-key cryptography is too expensive. Although, the use of symmetric key cryptography as an alternative in traditional WSN is a promising solution, it is not as versatile as asymmetric cryptography. Also, due to the tiny physical attributes of the Sensor Nodes (SNs) in WSNs, they are prone to physical attacks. In the context of WSNs, the physical attacks may range from destroying, lifting, replacing and adding new SNs. The work in this paper addresses the threats induced due to physical attacks and, further proposes a methodology to mitigate it. The methodology incorporates the use of newly proposed secured, computationally less intensive and efficient asymmetric key distribution technique based on the additional commodity hardware Trusted Platform Module (TPM). Further, the paper demonstrates the merits of the proposed methodology. With some additional economical cost for the hardware, the proposed technique can fulfill the security requirement of WSNs, like confidentiality, integrity, authenticity, resilience to physical attack, key connectivity and data freshness.