The Monitoring Core: A framework for sensor security application development

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are used for the monitoring of physical and environmental phenomena, and applicable in a range of different domains (e.g., health care, military, critical infrastructure). When using WSNs in a variety of real-world applications, security is a vital problem that should be considered by developers. As the development of security applications (SAs) for WSNs require meticulous procedures and operations, the software implementation process can be more challenging than regular applications. Hence, in an effort to facilitate the design, development and implementation of WSN security applications, we introduce the Monitoring Core (M-Core). The M-Core is a modular, lightweight, and extensible software layer that gathers necessary data including the internal and the external status of the sensor (e.g., information about ongoing communications, neighbors, and sensing), and provides relevant information for the development of new SAs. Similar to other software development tools, the M-Core was developed to facilitate the design and development of new WSN SAs on different platforms. Moreover, a new user-friendly domain-specific language, the M-Core Control Language (MCL), was developed to further facilitate the use of the M-Core and reduce the developer's coding time. With the MCL, a user can implement new SAs without the overhead of learning the details of the underlying sensor software architecture (e.g., TinyOS). The M-Core has been implemented in TinyOS-2.x and tested on real sensors (Tmote Sky and MicaZ). Using the M-Core architecture, we implemented several SAs to show that the M-Core allows easy and rapid development of security programs efficiently and effectively.