Development of an extended topology-based lightweight cryptographic scheme for IEEE 802.15.4 wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Among the classes of wireless personal area networks, a wireless sensor network typically refers to a versatile and densely distributed sensing platform that enables the support of a wide variety of application domains. Among the various technical challenges addressed by more than one decade of research in wireless sensor networks, security across wireless links is by far one of the most critical ones and relates to the need of guaranteeing reliability and trustiness of the collected data. This article deals with the cryptographic aspects involved in securing wireless sensor networks, in terms of confidentiality and authentication. In particular, moving from some results previously achieved in our research activity, this article extends a cryptography scheme in order to better comply with the security requirements that arise from real-world wireless sensor network installations. The proposed scheme, called topology-authenticated key scheme 2, takes advantage of hybrid cryptography to provide security in the presence of resource-constrained sensor nodes using topology-authenticated keys to provide increased robustness to the scheme itself. The proposed extensions provide full practical support to star-topology wireless sensor networks and the article presents also some experimental results obtained by implementing the scheme on two different wireless sensor network platforms available for protocol stacks compliant with the IEEE 802.15.4 standard.

WSN Protocols and Security Challenges for Environmental Monitoring Applications: A Survey

“…WSN network topology is the physical or logical placement or arrangement of sensor nodes in an observed area of interest. It also includes how sensor nodes communicate within the network to collect data from the environment and transmit it to a base station via a sink node [81]. Topology requirements in WSN for EMAs vary depending on the environment and application.…”

“…The topology can self-organize when individual sensor nodes fail or deplete their energy. In dynamic topologies, when new nodes are added to the network after some nodes fail, the identity of the new node enters the network without changing the topology [81].…”

E2DA: Energy Efficient Data Aggregation and End-to-End Security in 3D Reconfigurable WSN

“…The conventional key-based cryptographic system often required high computation which leads to in-efficient WSN [28]. Due to the energy and computation constrained nature of WSN, lightweight cryptographic schemes need to be implemented [29]. The paper [30] proposed a secure lightweight hash-based node verification protocol.…”

The VALU3S ECSEL Project: Verification and Validation of Automated Systems Safety and Security

“…The goal is the prevention of passive attacks on data through cryptography and also detection of active attacks against network availability. Specifically, the services provided by such a middleware will be: Party authentication service; Key generation and management service using WSN-specific mechanisms [65,66];…”

“…Intrusion detection and threat estimation service [67,68]. The middleware and its services will improve the V&V processes by providing enhanced V&V methods (e.g., WPM-based IDS [66]) to check and to satisfy the SCP requirements in WSNs platforms. The middleware will be mainly tailored to real-world IEEE 802.15.4-based WSNs and also to other kind of resource-constrained network (e.g.…”