Security Of Sensor Nodes Research Articles

Securing Wireless Sensors in Military Applications through Resilient Authentication Mechanism

Abstract Using wireless sensor nodes in military operations reduces risks and improves the efficiency of operations, and above all, it minimizes causalities by a large number. Security of sensor nodes is vital and crucial in their deployment and usage in military operations. Verifying the authenticity of sensor nodes is the most desired requirement in applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) such as in military to resist various attacks, i.e. replay attack, impersonation attack, ensure forward secrecy and backward secrecy; to reduce the computational and communicational overheads and less consumption of battery power. Here, we propose an efficient and secure authentication protocol for WSNs with context to military applications. Customized digital certificate is used for proving the legitimacy of the sensor nodes. In WSNs, a node is preloaded with the base station’s public key at the time of deployment; it requests and acquires its certificate from the base station and is later used for mutual authentication by sensor nodes. Here, the digital certificate generated and later used by nodes, is customized according to the requirements of military applications. This protocol achieves different security requirements with low computational and communicational overheads. The formal and automated security analysis has been done and proved that the protocol is safe and secure from potential security attacks.

An Anti-Electromagnetic Attack PUF Based on a Configurable Ring Oscillator for Wireless Sensor Networks.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are an emerging technology employed in some crucial applications. However, limited resources and physical exposure to attackers make security a challenging issue for a WSN. Ring oscillator-based physical unclonable function (RO PUF) is a potential option to protect the security of sensor nodes because it is able to generate random responses efficiently for a key extraction mechanism, which prevents the non-volatile memory from storing secret keys. In order to deploy RO PUF in a WSN, hardware efficiency, randomness, uniqueness, and reliability should be taken into account. Besides, the resistance to electromagnetic (EM) analysis attack is important to guarantee the security of RO PUF itself. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture of configurable RO PUF based on exclusive-or (XOR) gates. First, it dramatically increases the hardware efficiency compared with other types of RO PUFs. Second, it mitigates the vulnerability to EM analysis attack by placing the adjacent RO arrays in accordance with the cosine wave and sine wave so that the frequency of each RO cannot be detected. We implement our proposal in XINLINX A-7 field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and conduct a set of experiments to evaluate the quality of the responses. The results show that responses pass the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) statistical test and have good uniqueness and reliability under different environments. Therefore, the proposed configurable RO PUF is suitable to establish a key extraction mechanism in a WSN.

Secure authentication approach using Diffie-Hellman key exchange algorithm for WSN

Most of the sensor network applications are deployed in a hostile environment. So to keep the confidentiality of the information over sensor network, secure communication between the sink and the sensor nodes is required. Cryptographic key distribution provides a solution for this security challenge. This paper presents a secure key distribution using Diffie-Hellman key exchange algorithm and key pre-distribution scheme. It also proposes the design of a tampering alarm to isolate the compromised node in the network after attack. This paper aims at increasing the sensor network security by increasing sensor node's security against tampering and key compromisation, by using hardware tampering module.

Enhancement of Routes Performance in MANET Avoiding Tunneling Attack

MANET consists of spatially distributed autonomous small devices which creates a self connected environment. MANETs are originally motivated by military applications such as border surveillance and battlefield monitoring; today MANET can be used in many civilian applications, including home automation, healthcare, traffic control and habitat/environment monitoring. basic security services of MANET include authentication, confidentiality, integrity, anonymity and availability. However, in contrast to traditional wireless networks, in MANET [1], physical security of sensor nodes are not granted as they are usually deployed in remote and hostile environments. Therefore, attackers can easily compromise sensor nodes and use them to degrade the network's performance. Due to lack of physical security, the existing security solutions that are developed for traditional wireless networks cannot be directly employed in MANET. The security requirements of many protocols changed the situation and a more detailed research is currently underway to develop secure ad hoc routing protocols. MANETs are extremely vulnerable to attacks due to their dynamically changing topology, absence of conventional security infrastructures and open medium of communication, which, unlike their wired counterparts, cannot be secured. This paper focuses on wormhole based attacks and their detection mechanisms are analyzed. In this paper we specifically considering Tunneling attack which do not require exploiting any nodes in the network and can interfere with the route establishment process. Instead of detecting suspicious routes as in previous methods, we implement a new method which detects the attacker nodes and works without modification of protocol, using a hop-count and time delay analysis from the viewpoint of users without any special environment assumptions. The proposed work is simulated using OPNET-14, and results showing the advantages of proposed work.