WSN Security Research Articles

A Trust-Aware and Location-Based Secure Routing Protocol for WSN

The Wireless Sensor Network applications has widely been used over the last few years. WSN is a novel self-organization wireless network which is made up of randomly distributed sensor Nodes. Due to some resource constraints, the design of security in WSN encounters a great many of new challenges. It is vulnerable to attack, which is harmful for availability of WSN. In this paper we propose a trust-aware and location-based secure routing protocol which protects WSN against routing attacks, and also supports large-scale WSN deployments. The proposed protocol is extended from GPSR protocol, which imports security mechanism that depends on a distributed trust management system. The solution has been shown to efficiently detect and avoid malicious nodes.

Data Transfer Security solution for Wireless Sensor Network

WSN is a wide growth area for specific resource limited application. Factor associated with technology like, the encryption security, operating speed and power consumption for network. Here, we introduce a mechanism for secure transferring of data is WSN and various security related issues. This energy-efficient encryption is a secure communication framework in which an algorithm is used to encode the sensed data using like, RC5, AES and CAST Algorithm. The proposed scheme is most suitable for wireless sensor networks that incorporate data centric routing protocols. An algorithm in sensor network is help to designers predict security performance under a set of constraints for WSNs. This symmetric key function is used to guarantee secure communications between in-network nodes and reliable operation cost. RC5 is good on the code point of view, but the key schedule consumes more resource time for efficient security aspects.

Enhanced RSACRT for Energy Efficient Authentication to Wireless Sensor Networks Security

Problem statement: The Security in WSN has become a challenge because of its inherent limitations of resources imposed on the sensor nodes. Authentication and key management scheme allows WSNs to be used with confidence and maintains integrity of data in sensor networks. Approach: In the WSN limited resource scenario the generation of public key done and are randomly pre distributed while deploying the sensor nodes. Since the sensor nodes are limited by energy it needs to concentrate on fast decryption and verification of message. In order to enable the fast decryption we have proposed a novel method which uses three algorithms hybrid to achieve the increase in decryption speed which in turn reduces the energy used for computation and enhances its performance compared with the existing authentication using classical RSA algorithm. Results: The proposed Enhanced Variant of RSA with CRT using Garner’s algorithm to achieve fast decryption speed and provides better performance when compared to the existing RSA. The private key is generated and passed so that the receiver node need not generate it which consumes more computational cost, power and memory at the decryption stage. Also we have done the signing and verification which avoids the message spoofing attack and enable message confidentiality. Further the ERSACRT is designed to counter measure to few attacks possible on RSA. We implemented the ERSACRT in java and tested for system parameters like memory, time, speed and efficiency and compared with that of RSA. Conclusion/Recommendation: The proposed algorithm ERSACRT is efficient and secured along with improved counter measures for secured communication in WSN with reduced energy and computational time.

Comparative study of trust and reputation systems for wireless sensor networks

ABSTRACTWireless sensor networks (WSNs) are emerging as useful technology for information extraction from the surrounding environment by using numerous small‐sized sensor nodes that are mostly deployed in sensitive, unattended, and (sometimes) hostile territories. Traditional cryptographic approaches are widely used to provide security in WSN. However, because of unattended and insecure deployment, a sensor node may be physically captured by an adversary who may acquire the underlying secret keys, or a subset thereof, to access the critical data and/or other nodes present in the network. Moreover, a node may not properly operate because of insufficient resources or problems in the network link. In recent years, the basic ideas of trust and reputation have been applied to WSNs to monitor the changing behaviors of nodes in a network. Several trust and reputation monitoring (TRM) systems have been proposed, to integrate the concepts of trust in networks as an additional security measure, and various surveys are conducted on the aforementioned system. However, the existing surveys lack a comprehensive discussion on trust application specific to the WSNs. This survey attempts to provide a thorough understanding of trust and reputation as well as their applications in the context of WSNs. The survey discusses the components required to build a TRM and the trust computation phases explained with a study of various security attacks. The study investigates the recent advances in TRMs and includes a concise comparison of various TRMs. Finally, a discussion on open issues and challenges in the implementation of trust‐based systems is also presented. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A Comparative Study of Security Protocols for Wsns

Wireless sensor network is a network comprises of low cost resource constrained sensor nodes that are communicating using wireless medium. Similar to other technologies, in WSNs there are some considerable issues that should be taken into account. One of that issues is security. As the wireless sensor nodes are employed in a remote or hostile environmental area that is prone to attacks frequently, so security is an important and valuable criterion to be considered in WSNs [6]. Many Secured protocols are proposed in wireless sensor networks. This paper is presented to do a comparative study of all these protocols considering all the challenging issues and requirements of security. Summary: This paper analyzes five popular WSN security protocols: SPINS [6,7], LEAP[8] TINYSEC [6,7], MINYSEC[4,9], and ZIGBEE[10], And SIM[11]. The paper also presents an application characteristics table which helps to select the appropriate security protocols. Rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the general security constraints of WSN. Section 3 defines the security challenges in WSNs. Section 4 provides the major features of selected security protocols. Section 5 analyzes and compares the selected security protocols. Finally, Section 6 concludes the paper.

Security management in Wireless Sensor Networks for healthcare

This paper first discusses emerging security threats, requirements and solutions for WSNs. In addition, the current applications and architectures of WSNs in healthcare systems are explained in detail. Then an assessment framework for WSN security for healthcare is developed to determine the security impact of WSNs on the healthcare applications. This framework will evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each WSN security architecture and standard for healthcare. Lastly, solutions to close the gap between the existing and idea security will be proposed as well as the future directions for WSN security management.

Optimized Elliptic Curve Cryptography as Fine Balance for Wireless Sensor Network

Wireless Sensor Network communication is naturally unreliable and can cause communication packets to be damaged or dropped. This unpredictability in communication poses additional threats to the nodes if dropped packets are taken over by adversaries. Optimized Elliptic curve cryptography (O-ECC) can assist more secure towards WSN security and improved protocol design. Optimized Elliptic curve cryptography is not only emerged as an attractive public key crypto-system for mobile / wireless environments but also provides bandwidth savings. This paper presents a light security algorithm i.e. Optimized ECC which is enhancement of traditional Elliptic Curve Cryptography for wireless sensor network.

Security in Wireless Sensor Networks using Frequency Hopping

Sensor Network (WSN) is a collection of thousands of tiny sensor nodes having the capability of wireless communication, limited computation and sensing. These networks are vulnerable to internal and external attacks due to the lack of tamper-resistant packaging and the insecure nature of wireless communication channels. Since most of the existing routing protocols are application specific and hence do not satisfy the security constraints of wireless sensor networks. Whenever any device comes within the frequency range can get the access to the transmitting data and may affect the transmission. In this paper, we simulated the concept of frequency hopping and proved it a better approach to provide security in WSN..

Formal analysis of security protocols for wireless sensor networks

Abstract Design of security protocols is notoriously error-prone. For this reason, it is required to use formal methods to analyze their security properties. In the paper we present a formal analysis of the Canvas protocol. The Canvas protocol was developed by Harald Vogt and should provide data integrity inWireless Sensor Networks. However, Dieter Gollmann published an attack on the protocol. We consider the fallacy of the Canvas scheme in different models of the attacker and present a solution for correcting the scheme.We propose a formal model of the fixed Canvas protocol in the applied pi-calculus. This model includes a model of the network topology, communication channels, captured nodes, and capabilities of the attacker. Moreover, we formulate and analyze the data integrity property of the scheme in the semantic model of the applied pi-calculus. We prove that the fixed Canvas scheme, in the presence of an active adversary, provides data integrity of messages assuming that captured nodes are not direct neighbors in the communication graph of a sensor network. Finally, we discuss the applicability of the proposed formal model for analysis of other WSN security protocols.

A hybrid security protocol for sensor networks

Sensor nodes used to transmit sensitive data, especially in military applications, require securing the data transmitted through the WSNs to maintain the confidentiality of the data and authenticate the participating sensor nodes. Since sensor nodes suffer from limited resources, in memory storage, computing power, energy capabilities and transmission rates, available network security protocols are inadequate. Symmetric algorithms cannot provide the same degree of security as public key algorithms, leading us to devise a new algorithm SHESP that uses public keys within the limitations of sensor nodes. This paper presents a way to utilise existing public key algorithms such as RSA, Diffie-Hellmann and elliptic curve in the field of WSN security by dividing the network into clusters. Our algorithm supplies data confidentiality, node authentication and data integrity while remaining within acceptable memory, time and energy constraints. We provide theoretical and experimental evidence to validate our algorithms. Results reveal significant improvement in data availability, data confidentiality and authenticity while reducing the communication and computation overhead.

Securing wireless sensor networks: a survey

The significant advances of hardware manufacturing technology and the development of efficient software algorithms make technically and economically feasible a network composed of numerous, small, low-cost sensors using wireless communications, that is, a wireless sensor network. WSNs have attracted intensive interest from both academia and industry due to their wide application in civil and military scenarios. In hostile scenarios, it is very important to protect WSNs from malicious attacks. Due to various resource limitations and the salient features of a wireless sensor network, the security design for such networks is significantly challenging. In this article, we present a comprehensive survey of WSN security issues that were investigated by researchers in recent years and that shed light on future directions for WSN security.

An application‐driven approach to designing secure wireless sensor networks

AbstractWireless sensor networks (WSNs) have recently attracted a lot of interest due to the wide range of applications they enable. Unfortunately, WSNs are exposed to numerous security threats that can adversely affect the success of important applications. Securing WSNs is challenging due to their limited capabilities and the unique nature of the network and applications. In this paper, we argue that the WSN security research generally considers mechanisms that are modeled after and evaluated against abstract applications and WSN organizations. Instead, we propose that the solution for WSN security must be sensitive to the application and infrastructure. Specifically, we formulate a new notion of an application‐specific security context as the combination of a potential attacker's motivation and the WSN vulnerability. The vulnerability is a function of factors such as the sensor field, WSN infrastructure, application, protocols, system software, accessibility, and the observability of the WSN. To reduce the vulnerability, we argue that WSN design must balance security with traditional objectives such as the cost, energy efficiency, and application level performance to a degree proportional to the attacker's motivation. We illustrate this argument via four example applications. Overall, our work can be considered a basis to derive more grounded and realistic assumptions for WSN security and develop cost‐effective security solutions to handle application‐specific vulnerabilities in WSNs. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.