SENSORLock: a lightweight key management scheme for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Security in wireless sensor networks demands an efficient key management scheme. As sensors typically operate unattended, it becomes quite important to ensure security to cryptographic keys stored in their memories. In this scenario, the development of lightweight encryption mechanisms is a challenge because of sensor‐constrained resources. In this work, we present a mechanism tailored to sensor networks called SENSORLock applying it to a specific case. Our main contribution is to propose, analyze, and demonstrate the feasibility of SENSORLock for secure symmetric key distribution solving the stored key exposure problem. Analytical results demonstrate that this approach increases the system's security against the tampering of sensor nodes. Additionally, the mechanism is evaluated using simulation and practical experiments, using the TinyOS platform. Simulation results reveal that this scheme introduces very low processing overhead, in the order of nanoseconds, and an estimated power consumption quite similar to existing approaches. Besides, practical experiments indicate that the scheme can be deployed by off‐the‐shelf sensors, such as MicaZ and TelosB. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

On the Performance of a Secure Storage Mechanism for Key Distribution Architectures in Wireless Sensor Networks

“…Firstly, we want to highlight that a security analysis was carried out in Kazienko and Albuquerque [21]. Additionally, real small-scale experiments were accomplished in Kazienko et al [6] where a small scenario was deployed with TelosB and MicaZ sensors. Experimental results revealed the low footprint of code and SENSORLock low processing overhead.…”

“…In our previous work, we focused on secure symmetric keys storage supported by a cryptographic module (CM) responsible for holding a secret Z used to encrypt all system keys and data stored within the sensor's flash memory. We argue that CMs are affordable and, therefore, can be incorporated to off-the-shelf sensors, as discussed in Kazienko et al [6].…”

“…In a previous work, we introduced SENSORLock [6]. It is a mechanism that assures secure key storage in sensors.…”

An energy‐efficient and security aware route selection protocol for wireless sensor networks

“…In order for the attacker to succeed in this case, he has to compromise all n paths. In , they proposed a secure symmetric key distribution mechanism for WSNs that solved the stored key exposure problem. Optimal key management design for secure WSNs was investigated in .…”

A New Key Predistribution Scheme for Multiphase Sensor Networks Using a New Deployment Model

“…Public-key operations (both software and hardware implementations), albeit computationally feasible [5,6], consume energy approximately three orders of magnitude higher than symmetric key encryption [7]. Therefore, in the last few years, different key distribution schemes using symmetric key algorithms have been developed for SNs [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26].…”