Unattended Wireless Sensor Network Research Articles

A Smart Cryptographic measure for Data Survivability in Unattended Wireless Sensor Networks

An Unattended Wireless Sensor Network (UWSN) wherein a sporadically visiting sink tries to collect data absorbed by the motes. This setup is most suitable in hostile environments where the collected valuable data becomes the target for a mobile adversary. Unattended sensors cannot instantly transmit collected data to some safe external entity. Though there is an intermittent visit by the sink, a powerful mobile adversary can easily compromise the valuable data collected by sensor nodes between the intervals. Therefore, the data needs to be preserved to be handed over to the sink in its next visit. This property of unattended WSN is called as Data Survivability. We propose a symmetric key cryptosystem that tackles sensor collected data erasure, modification, or disclosure as a support for data survivability in UWSNs. The proposed model has been designed using Linear Feedback Shift Registers (LFSRs) embodied with less power dissipation mechanism that operates on mask method. This is critical to any application running in unattended environments. We have compared our design with other standard works and have substantially proved the trustworthiness. Our work has been assessed using NIST test suite and found reliable.

Energy efficient secure data collection with path-constrained mobile sink in duty-cycled unattended wireless sensor network

This paper addresses the problem of secure data transmission and balanced energy consumption in an unattended wireless sensor network (UWSN) comprising of multiple static source nodes and a mobile sink in the presence of adversaries. The proposed system comprises of three phases: the identification of data collection points (convex nodes), path planning by the mobile sink, and secure data transmission. An energy-aware convex hull algorithm is used for the identification of data collection points for data transmission to the mobile sink. Data transmission from sensor nodes to the nearest data collection point is performed using multihop communication and from sensor nodes to the mobile sink in a single hop. Data are securely transmitted through an elliptic curve cryptography based ElGamal scheme for message authentication. A data packet is associated with a digital signature. The variation in a digital signature and threshold energy obtained using support vector machine is used to determine the presence of malicious nodes in the network. The performance of the proposed system is evaluated using Cooja simulator by Contiki for various node counts under a static sink and mobile sink, with different threat scenarios. The results indicate that the proposed system is resilient against threats and provides satisfactory performance

Erratum to: MRL-SCSO: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning-Based Self-Configuration and Self-Optimization Protocol for Unattended Wireless Sensor Networks

Resource-constrained nodes in unattended wireless sensor network (UWSN) operate in a hostile environment with less human intervention. Achieving the optimal quality of service (QoS) in terms of packet delivery ratio, delay, energy, and throughput is crucial. In this paper, we propose a topology control and data dissemination protocol that uses multi-agent reinforcement learning (MRL) and energy-aware convex-hull algorithm, for effective self-configuration and self-optimization (SCSO) in UWSN, called MRL-SCSO. MRL-SCSO maintains a reliable topology in which the effective active neighbor nodes are selected using MRL. The network boundary is determined using convex-hull algorithm to maintain the connectivity and coverage of the network. The boundary nodes transmit data under high traffic load conditions. The performance of MRL-SCSO is evaluated for various nodes count and under different load conditions by using the Contiki’s Cooja simulator. The results showed that MRL-SCSO stabilizes the performance and improves QoS.

멀티 홉 Unattended WSN에서 가변 키 슬롯 기반 μTESLA의 운영

무선 센서 네트워크에서 브로드캐스트 인증 방법 중 하나인 <TEX>${\mu}$</TEX>TESLA는 안전한 센서 네트워크의 운영을 위해 BS(base station)로부터 센서 노드로 전달하는 브로드캐스트 메시지의 인증을 가능하게 한다. 하지만 UWSN 환경에서 매우 짧은 키 슬롯 값을 갖는 <TEX>${\mu}$</TEX>TESLA를 사용할 경우, 센서 노드들은 공개된 비밀키 검증을 위하여 많은 양의 해시값을 계산하여야 한다. 반대로, 센서 노드의 해시 연산량을 줄이기 위하여 <TEX>${\mu}$</TEX>TESLA의 키 슬롯 길이를 지나치게 길게 잡는다면, BS는 키를 공개하기 위하여 그 지나치게 긴 슬롯 길이만큼의 시간을 기다려야 한다. 이 논문에서는 이러한 점을 개선하기 위하여 가변 길이의 키 슬롯을 갖는 <TEX>${\mu}$</TEX>TESLA에 대하여 제안하였으며, 이를 모의 실험한 결과를 보임으로써, 우리의 기법이 센서 노드의 응답 시간을 향상시키고 센서 노드에서 수행되는 해시 연산의 수를 효과적으로 줄였음을 증명한다. As a broadcast message authentication method in wireless sensor networks, <TEX>${\mu}$</TEX>TESLA enables sensor nodes efficiently authenticate message from base station (BS). However, if we use <TEX>${\mu}$</TEX>TESLA that has very short length of key slot in unattended wireless sensor network (UWSN), sensors may calculate a huge amount of hashs at once in order to verify the revealed secret key. In contrast, if we set the length of <TEX>${\mu}$</TEX>TESLA's key slot too long in order to reduce the amount of hashs to calculate, BS should wait out the long slot time to release key. In this paper, we suggest variable key slot <TEX>${\mu}$</TEX>TESLA in order to mitigate the problem. As showing experiment results, we prove that our suggestion improve sensor node's response time and decrease of number of hash function calculation.

Achieving Key Privacy and Invisibility for Unattended Wireless Sensor Networks in Healthcare

In this study, we propose an efficient aggregate signcryption scheme to maximize the security of data in a kind of wireless medical network named the disconnected or unattended wireless sensor network (applied in medical systems). These networks address patients who need to be monitored for a long time. The main challenge of these networks that are usually implanted on the patient's clothing and established in sensitive conditions is that the server (station) visits sensors continuously. Moreover, the sensors must retain data for long enough time to off-load to the station as they have limited capacity and batteries. This disconnected nature gives adversaries the power to read and modify target data without being detected or disclose private medical data related to a patient. In this paper, we address these security problems and improve the first study of identity-based aggregate signcryption in UWSNs to achieve both key privacy and invisibility. Our improved approach is at the same time efficient in terms of space and communication overload. Moreover, the proposed scheme allows servers to efficiently verify and unsigncrypt all the related data accumulated by sensors. We further show that the proposed scheme has resistance against reading and modifying attacks. We compare our scheme with the best alternative works in the literature.

Acquiring Authentic Data in Unattended Wireless Sensor Networks

An Unattended Wireless Sensor Network (UWSN) can be used in many applications to collect valuable data. Nevertheless, due to the unattended nature, the sensors could be compromised and the sensor readings would be maliciously altered so that the sink accepts the falsified sensor readings. Unfortunately, few attentions have been given to this authentication problem. Moreover, existing methods suffer from different kinds of DoS attacks such as Path-Based DoS (PDoS) and False Endorsement-based DoS (FEDoS) attacks. In this paper, a scheme, called AAD, is proposed to Acquire Authentic Data in UWSNs. We exploit the collaboration among sensors to address the authentication problem. With the proper design of the collaboration mechanism, AAD has superior resilience against sensor compromises, PDoS attack, and FEDoS attack. In addition, compared with prior works, AAD also has relatively low energy consumption. In particular, according to our simulation, in a network with 1,000 sensors, the energy consumed by AAD is lower than 30% of that consumed by the existing method, ExCo. The analysis and simulation are also conducted to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed AAD scheme over the existing methods.