Secure and practical access control mechanism for WSN with node privacy

Abstract

An access control mechanism plays a critical role in new node deployment within a resource-constrained Wireless Sensor Networks. The deployment of a new node is inevitable either due to the outage of power or nodes getting compromised due to the adversary’s attacks. The access control scheme prevents malicious node deployment and also allows a new node to establish a shared key with its neighbors for secure communication. Besides having low communication and computational overheads, an access control mechanism must suffice to specific security and functional requirements for their practical implementations. In this paper, a provable and practical access control scheme based on Elliptical Curve Cryptography (ECC) has been presented. The proposed access control scheme supports node privacy while addressing all other major functional and security requirements. The formal validation of the proposed scheme has been carried out using automated validation of internet security protocols and applications (AVISPA) and Scyther tools. A comparative study of the proposed scheme with the existing schemes has been carried out on various security and functional requirements suggesting a better trade-off. Finally, practical experimentation on TinyOS and MICAz motes has been carried out to provide detailed energy analysis and test-bed implementation of the proposed scheme.