A Framework for Constructing a Secure Domain of Sensor Nodes

Abstract

Application of the Internet of Things (IoT) in some critical areas (e.g., military) is limited mainly due to the lack of robust, secure, and trusted measures needed to ensure the availability, confidentiality, and integrity of information throughout its lifecycle. Considering the mostly limited resources of IoT devices connected by wireless networks and their dynamic placement in unsupervised or even hostile environments, security is a complex and considerable issue. In this paper, a framework which encompasses an approach to integrate some security measures to build a so-called “secure domain of sensors nodes” is proposed. The framework is based on the use of the Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs) in wireless sensor nodes. It encompasses an architecture of sensor nodes, their roles in the domain, and the data structures as well as the developed procedures which could be applied to generate the credentials for the sensor nodes, and subsequently, to build a local trust structure of each node as well as to build a trust relationship between a domain’s nodes. The proposed solution ensures the authentication of sensor nodes and their resistance against unauthorized impact with the hardware/software configuration allowing protection against malware that can infect the software. The usefulness of the presented framework was confirmed experimentally.

Security and Privacy in Wireless Sensor Networks: Advances and Challenges

“…Reference [5] presents a framework for contrasting a secure domain of sensor nodes. The authors wanted to integrate some security measures to build a secure environment in a WSN.…”

REISCH: Incorporating Lightweight and Reliable Algorithms into Healthcare Applications of WSNs

“…This section briefly discusses existing studies [17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25] designed to secure patient data in the EMR and highlights their drawbacks.…”

“…They used wearable sensors to collect patient data and used a mobile device to send and store these data in the medical repository (cloud server). Finally, Furtak et al [25] designed a framework based on RSA-2048 bits and trusted modules to secure the sensors' domain and prevent unauthorized threats. They organized sensors into master, replica, and gateway categories in the network area and data structure in the sensor memory.…”

“…REISCH uses ECDSA-BLAKE2bp and random pseudonyms to secure data signing. The scheme in [25] is based on SHA1 and HMAC, which are vulnerable to attacks in signing and authenticating collected data. It also does not include a pseudonym mechanism to protect SN i parameters from misbehaving.…”

“…It also addresses only computations in transport while REISCH addresses computations in transport and processing using BLAKE2bp and homomorphic property. The schemes in [20,24,25] rely on the use of encryption to protect data without a homomorphic property, since encryption processes extremely consume SNs resources (as mentioned in Section 3.3, Point 3), while REISCH uses signatures and homomorphic property to improve HWSN network performance. Although the scheme in [23] uses encryption and signature of data with homomorphic properties, encryption can particularly affect network performance, especially through a burden on the servers.…”