Access Control For Sensor Networks Research Articles

Practical access control for sensor networks in the context of the Internet of Things

Wireless sensor network (WSN) plays an important role in military sensing and tracking, target tracking, and environment monitoring. To query of the network to get useful information from anywhere and anytime, we need to integrate the WSN into the Internet as part of the Internet of Things (IoT). In this case, it is an important task to design an access control scheme that can authorize, authenticate and revoke a user to access the WSN. In this paper, we propose a heterogeneous signcryption scheme to control the access behavior of the users. We give the formal security proof of our scheme in the random oracle model. An important characteristic of our scheme is to allow a user in a certificateless cryptography (CLC) environment to send a message to a sensor node in an identity-based cryptography (IBC) environment. We give an access control scheme for the WSN in the context of the IoT using the proposed signcryption scheme. As compared with existing two access control schemes using signcryption, the computational cost of sensors in our scheme is reduced by about 22% and 53%, respectively and the energy consumption of sensors in our scheme is reduced by about 33% and 54%, respectively.

Distributed Privacy-Preserving Access Control in Sensor Networks

The owner and users of a sensor network may be different, which necessitates privacy-preserving access control. On the one hand, the network owner need enforce strict access control so that the sensed data are only accessible to users willing to pay. On the other hand, users wish to protect their respective data access patterns whose disclosure may be used against their interests. This paper presents DP <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> AC, a Distributed Privacy-Preserving Access Control scheme for sensor networks, which is the first work of its kind. Users in DP <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> AC purchase tokens from the network owner whereby to query data from sensor nodes which will reply only after validating the tokens. The use of blind signatures in token generation ensures that tokens are publicly verifiable yet unlinkable to user identities, so privacy-preserving access control is achieved. A central component in DP <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> AC is to prevent malicious users from reusing tokens, for which we propose a suite of distributed token reuse detection (DTRD) schemes without involving the base station. These schemes share the essential idea that a sensor node checks with some other nodes (called witnesses) whether a token has been used, but they differ in how the witnesses are chosen. We thoroughly compare their performance with regard to TRD capability, communication overhead, storage overhead, and attack resilience. The efficacy and efficiency of DP <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> AC are confirmed by detailed performance evaluations.

Public-key based access control in sensornet

Symmetric cryptography has been mostly used in security schemes in sensor networks due to the concern that public key cryptography (PKC) is too expensive for sensor devices. While these schemes are efficient in processing time, they generally require complicated key management, which may introduce high memory and communication overhead. On the contrary, PKC-based schemes have simple and clean key management, but cost more computational time. The recent progress in PKC implementation, specially elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), on sensors motivates us to design a PKC-based security scheme and compare its performance with the symmetric-key counterparts. This paper proposes a practical PKC-based access control for sensor networks, which consists of pairwise key establishment, local access control, and remote access control. We have implemented both cryptographic primitives on commercial off-the-shelf sensor devices. Building the user access control as a case study, we show that PKC-based protocol is more advantageous than those built on symmetric cryptography in terms of the memory usage, message complexity, and security resilience. Meanwhile, our work also provides insights in integrating and designing PKC-based security protocols for sensor networks.

Achieving distributed user access control in sensor networks

User access control in sensor networks defines a process of granting user an access right to the stored information. It is essential for future real sensor network deployment in which sensors may provide users with different services in terms of data and resource accesses. A centralized access control mechanism requires the base station to be involved whenever a user requests to get authenticated and access the information stored in the sensor node, which is inefficient, not scalable, and is exposed to many potential attacks along long communication paths. In this paper, we propose a distributed user access control under a realistic adversary model in which sensors can be compromised and user may collude. We split the access control into local authentication conducted by a group of sensors physically close to a user, and a light remote authentication based on the endorsement of the local sensors. We implement the access control protocols on a testbed of TelosB motes. Our analysis and experimental results show that our schemes are feasible for real access control requirements.

Efficient and distributed access control for sensor networks

Sensor networks are a promising computing paradigm for monitoring the physical environment and providing observations for various uses. In hostile situations, it is critical to enforce network access control to ensure the integrity, availability, and at times confidentiality of the sensor data. A natural idea is to adopt a centralized design where every access request from users goes through a trusted base station. However, this idea is not practical due to the cost and efficiency issues. This paper proposes two efficient and distributed access control methods, uni-access query and multi-access query. The uni-access query uses only symmetric cryptographic operations; it allows (1) a user to directly access the data on any sensor node in the network without going through the base station and (2) a sensor to protect its data so that only authorized users can access. Compared to existing solutions, this scheme is much more flexible and efficient. In addition, this scheme can also support privilege delegation, which allows a user to delegate all or part of its privilege to others without using the base station. The multi-access query applies public key cryptography to provide an additional feature, which allows a user to access the data on many sensor nodes via a single query. Compared to existing solutions that require a user to send at least one request for every sensor node to be queried, the multi-access query reduces the communication overhead significantly. The theoretical analysis and simulation evaluation show that the proposed schemes are practical for access control in sensor networks.

Elliptic curve cryptography-based access control in sensor networks

Access control in sensor networks is used to authorise and grant users the right to access the network and data collected by sensors. Different users have different access right due to the access restriction implicated by the data security and confidentiality. Even though symmetric-key scheme, which has been investigated extensively for sensor networks, can fulfil the requirement, public-key cryptography is more flexible and simple rendering a clean interface for the security component. Against the popular belief that a public key scheme is not practical for sensor networks, this paper describes a public-key implementation of access control in a sensor network. We detail the implementation of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) over primary field, a public-key cryptography scheme, on TelosB, which is the latest sensor network platform. We evaluate the performance of our implementation and compare with other implementations we have ported to TelosB.