Authentication Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Authors: Sunil Gupta, Harsh Kumar Verma, AL Sangal

Abstract:

Wireless sensor networks can be used to measure and monitor many challenging problems and typically involve in monitoring, tracking and controlling areas such as battlefield monitoring, object tracking, habitat monitoring and home sentry systems. However, wireless sensor networks pose unique security challenges including forgery of sensor data, eavesdropping, denial of service attacks, and the physical compromise of sensor nodes. Node in a sensor networks may be vanished due to power exhaustion or malicious attacks. To expand the life span of the sensor network, a new node deployment is needed. In military scenarios, intruder may directly organize malicious nodes or manipulate existing nodes to set up malicious new nodes through many kinds of attacks. To avoid malicious nodes from joining the sensor network, a security is required in the design of sensor network protocols. In this paper, we proposed a security framework to provide a complete security solution against the known attacks in wireless sensor networks. Our framework accomplishes node authentication for new nodes with recognition of a malicious node. When deployed as a framework, a high degree of security is reachable compared with the conventional sensor network security solutions. A proposed framework can protect against most of the notorious attacks in sensor networks, and attain better computation and communication performance. This is different from conventional authentication methods based on the node identity. It includes identity of nodes and the node security time stamp into the authentication procedure. Hence security protocols not only see the identity of each node but also distinguish between new nodes and old nodes.

Keywords: Authentication, Key management, Wireless Sensornetwork, Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC).

Digital Object Identifier (DOI): doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1331671

References:

[1] Perrig, R. Szewczyk, J.D. Tygar, V. Wen, D.E. Culler, SPINS: Security protocols for sensor networks, Wireless Networks 8 (September) (2002) 521-534.
[2] Karlof, N. Sastry, D. Wagner, TinySec: a link layer se-curity architecture for wireless sensor networks, in: The Second ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sen-sor Systems (SensSys-04), Baltimore, Maryland, Novem-ber 2004.
[3] L. Eschenauer, V. Gligor, A key management scheme for distributed sensor networks, in: The Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Se-curity (CCS-02), Washington DC, 2002.
[4] Haowen Chan, Adrian Perrig, Dawn Song, Random key predistribution schemes for sensor networks, in: Proceed-ings of the 2003 IEEE Symposium on Security and Priva-cy (S&P-03), 11-14 May 2003, p. 197.
[5] W. Du, J. Deng, Y.S. Han, P.K.Varshney, A pairwise key predistribution scheme for wireless sensor networks, in: The Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Com-puter and Communications Security (CCS-03), Washing-ton, DC, 27- 30 October 2003.
[6] Liu, P. Ning, Establishing pairwise keys in distributed sensor networks, in: The Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS-03), Washington, DC, 2003.
[7] R. Watro, D. Kong, S. Cuti, C. Gardiner, C. Lynn, P. Kruus, TinyPK: securing sensor networks with public key technology, in: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Workshop on Security of Ad hoc and Sensor Networks (SASN-04), Washington, DC, USA, 25 October 2004.
[8] J. Newsome, E. Shi, D. Song, A. Perrig, The sybil attack in sensor networks: analysis & defenses, in: The 3rd In-ternational Symposium on Information Processing in Sen-sor Networks (IPSN-04), Berkeley, California, USA, 26- April 2004.
[9] B. Parno, A. Perrig, V. Gligor, Distributed detection of node replication attacks in sensor networks, in: IEEE S&P-05, 2005.
[10] Y. Hu, A. Perrig, D.B. Johnson, Pachet leashes: a defense against wormhole attacks in wireless networks, in: IEEE INFOCOM-03, 2003.
[11] L. Hu, D. Evans, Using directional antennas to prevent wormhole attacks, in: The 11th Annual Network and Dis-tributed System Security Symposium (NDSS-04), San Di-ego, California, 5-6 February 2004.
[12] W. Wang, B. Bhargava, Visualization of wormholes in sensor networks, in: Proceedings of the 2004 ACM Work-shop on Wireless Security (Wise-04), Philadelphia, PA, USA, 1 October 2004.
[13] S.J. Choi, H.Y. Youn, An efficient key pre-distribution scheme for secure distributed sensor network, The 2005 IFIP International Conference on Embedded and Ubiquit-ous Computing (EUC-2005), LNCS 3823, 2005, pp. 1088-1097.
[14] L. Eschenauer, V.D. Gligor, A key-management scheme for distributed sensor networks, Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Computer and Communication Se-curity, 2002, pp. 41-47.
[15] C.W. Park, S.J. Choi, H.Y. Youn, A novel key pre-distribution scheme with LU matrix for secure wireless sensor networks, International Conference on Computa-tional Intelligence and Security (CIS 2005), Springer-Verlag, Germany, 2005, pp. 494-499, LNAI. 3801, Part I, Dec.
[16] S. Vanstone, Responses to NIST's proposal, Communica-tions of the ACM 35 (July1992) 50-52.
[17] Tanveer Zia and Albert Zomaya,"A security Framework for Wireless Sensor Networks", IEEE Applications Sym-posium, Houston, Texas USA, February 2006.
[18] J. Newsome, E. Shi, D. Song, A. Perrig, The sybil attack in sensor networks: analysis & defenses, in: The 3rd International Symposium on Information Processing in Sen-sor Networks (IPSN-04), Berkeley, California, USA, 26-April 2004.
[19] J.R. Douceur, ÔÇÿÔÇÿThe Sybil attack,-- First International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS-02), March 2002.
[20] Y. Hu, A. Perrig, D.B. Johnson, Pachet leashes: a defense against wormhole attacks in wireless networks, in: IEEE,. 417- 426.INFOCOM-03, 2003
[21] N. Koblitz, Elliptic curve cryptosystems, Mathematics of Computation 48 (1987) 203-209.
[22] Miller, Uses of elliptic curves in cryptography, Ad-vances in Cryptology- CPYPTO'85, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 218, Springer-Verlag, 1986, pp. 417-426.
[23] David J. Malan, Matt Welsh, Michael, and D. Smith, "A publickey infrastructure for key distribution in TinyOS based on elliptic curve cryptography," in Proceedings of First IEEE International Conference on Sensor and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks (SECON-04), October 2004, pp.145-161.
[24] Crossbow Technology. Available from: http://www.xbow. com
[25] N. Gura, A. Patel, A. Wander, H. Eberle, and S.C. Shantz, "Comparing elliptic curve cryptography and RSA on 8-bit CPUs," in: CHES-04, 2004, pp.67-75.
[26] Atmel Corporation. Available from: http://www.atmel.- com