A Better Way towards Key Establishment and Authentication in Wireless Sensor Networks

The integration of wireless sensor nodes (WSNs) in the Internet of things (IoT) may generate new security challenges for establishing secure channels between low-power sensor nodes and Internet hosts. It includes a bunch of challenges right from redefining the existing ones from scratch of legacy codes to the current trend of proposing and designing new key establishment and authentication protocols. This paper is the successful attempt in resource constraint environment like wireless sensor network (WSN) to integrate cipher authentication and lightweight key management solutions in one bundle so that it can be deployed in IoT domains WSN is also a part of IoT. The cipher should be authenticated, lightweight, and should be flexible to use in the cryptanalysis. The cipher gives the better authentication techniques and performance but limited to the flexibility. Lightweight block cipher (LBC) uses less computation and secures the data with low computational cost and it is used for many purposes like radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags and sensor network nodes. Advanced Encryption Standard is applied in many devices for the encryption, but it cannot be applied to the smaller embedded devices like wearable devices, etc. LBC works for the many devices with low resources, and research on the LBC has been increased. In this research, Data Encryption Standard (DES) and analyzed algorithm are used to increase the efficiency in terms of solving time and Improved Fault Analysis (IAFA) is used to increases the security of the LBC in wireless sensor node for IoT.

Sensor networks are often deployed in unattended environment, thus leaving those networks vulnerable to false data injection attacks. Attackers often inject false data into the network in order to deceive the base station or deplete the resource and the energy of the relaying nodes. The existing authentication mechanisms cannot prevent this kind of attack after an amount of sensor nodes have been compromised. Pairwise key establishment is a fundamental security in wireless sensor networks, which makes it possible that sensor nodes can communicate securely one another using cryptographic techniques. However, the limited resource and energy of sensor nodes are not feasible to use such traditional key management techniques as public/private cryptography and key distribution center (KDC). In this paper, we present a novel key management and data authentication technique that pass sensing data securely and filter false data out on its way to base station. The framework of our design is to divide sensing area into a number of location cells and a group of local cells consist of a logical cell, where, pairwise key between two sensor nodes is established according to the grid-based bivariate polynomials. The established pairwise key is included in the message authentication code (MAC) and is forwarded several hops down to the base station for data authentication. Our result shows that this location scheme and data authentication method decreases communication overhead, avoids t-tolerance, and filters bogus report in wireless sensor networks

Analyzing and developing the safety of DNS-based total Authentication in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is a critical research vicinity that is being actively pursued. While preceding work has blanketed authentication strategies to relax the communications between a node and its base station, our studies focus on analyzing the authentication schemes used to set up a comfy verbal exchange in a wireless Sensor network among nodes. We look at the assets of Symmetric and asymmetric Authentication Protocols for WSNs and examine their effectiveness in terms of their authentication effectiveness and overhead. We also discuss how they can be incorporated with current authentication schemes used for WSNs. We then gift a singular protocol that uses DNS-based Authentication to safely set up a verbal exchange in a Wi-Fi Sensor network. Ultimately, we put in force and tested our protocol and the degree of its overall performance in simulated surroundings. Our experiments' results show that our protocol gives an effective authentication answer for WSNs.

Key establishment is the basic step for the wireless sensor network (WSN) security. The polynomial based key predistribution scheme of Blom and Blundo et al. has been the basic ingredient for the key establishment for WSNs. It is tempting to use many random and different instances of polynomial based key predistribution scheme for various parts of the WSN to enhance the efficiency of WSN key establishment protocols. This paper indicates that it is not secured in general to use many instances of Blom-Blundo et al. polynomial based key predistribution scheme in a WSN key establishment protocol. Thus the previously constructed group-based type WSN key predistribution schemes using polynomial based key predistribution scheme are insecure. We propose new generalized Blom-Blundo et al. key predistribution schemes. These new generalized Blom-Blundo et al. key predistribution schemes can be used many times in one WSN key establishment protocol with only a small increase of cost. The application to group-based WSN key predistribution schemes is given.

Hop-by-hop authentication in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) prevents outside intruders from taking part in the network and launching attacks. Due to resource constraints of WSNs, standard key distribution schemes are not applicable. Such networks require resilience when intruders compromise a key. This paper presents NEKAP - neighborhood-based key agreement protocol, a key distribution protocol for WSNs. NEKAP is intruder resilient: an intruder that compromises a key has access to the links of a limited neighborhood, and not to those in other regions of the network. NEKAP is energy-efficient in that only a few messages are exchanged in small neighborhoods to establish the keys. The paper presents the protocol and algorithms, make a security analysis, compare it with other protocols in the literature and shows one implementation for the TinySec platform.

In-network processing presents a critical challenge for data authentication in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Current schemes relying on message authentication code (MAC) cannot provide natural support for this operation since even a slight modification to the data invalidates the MAC. In this paper, based on digital watermarking, we propose an end-to-end approach for data authentication in WSNs that provides inherent support for in-network processing. In this scheme, authentication information is modulated as watermark and superposed to the sensory data at the sensor nodes. The watermarked data can be aggregated by the intermediate nodes without incurring any en-route checking. Upon reception of the sensory data, possibly distorted by the operations along the route, the data sink is able to authenticate the data by validating the watermark, detecting whether the data has been altered and where it has occurred. In this way, the aggregation-survivable authentication information is only added at the sources and checked by the data sink, without any involvement of intermediate nodes. Furthermore, the simple operation of watermark embedding and complex operation of watermark detection provide a natural solution of function partitioning between the resource limited sensor nodes and resource abundant data sink. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme can successfully authenticate the sensory data with high confidence.

Nowadays research and applications of Wireless Sensor Network have attracted people's attention. Since sensor nodes in WSN are resource-constrained, the security solutions for WSN become difficult. In this paper, we propose to use Combined Public Key technique in Wireless Sensor Network. A new key management scheme, a key agreement and mutual authentication protocol based on CPK for WSN are given, which can fulfill confidential communication and mutual authentication between nodes under resource-constrained condition. Compared with other schemes, this scheme assures that Wireless Sensor Network is more efficient, scalable and it has high key connectivity and strong resilience.

Wireless Sensor Networks are being widely used in many real time applications that require continuous monitoring and maintenance of surroundings and their environment. Communication is a vital operation in WSN and most of the times the data is confidential. Hence, security of data is a major concern in WSN and it has been observed that a secure authentication mechanism will ensure confidentiality and integrity of data in WSN. Many authentication mechanisms have been designed but most of them require the sensor nodes to have much computational resources, involves much communication and storage overheads and are quite complex. In this paper, we propose a simple, secure, dynamic, scalable, efficient and lightweight protocol for mutual authentication of nodes in WSN. The protocol is based on tokens, each sensor node acquires a token from base station (BS) and later on without any involvement of BS sensor nodes mutually authenticate each other using acquired tokens. The proposed protocol was modeled in scyther for verification and no potential attacks were detected.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are considered due to the ubiquitous nature, ease of deployment, and wide range of possible applications. WSNs can be deployed in unattended environments, where a registered user can login to the network and access data collected by the linked sensors. Authenticating users in resource constrained environments is one of the major security concerns. Since sensor nodes have limited resources and computation power, it is desirable that the authentication protocol is simple and efficient. In 2009, M. L. Das proposed a two-factor authentication for WSNs, where a user has to prove possession of both, a password and a smart card. Since his scheme utilizes only cryptographic one-way hash function and exclusive-OR operation, it is well-suited for resource constrained environments. However, Khan and Algahathbar pointed out that Das's scheme has some flaws and is vulnerable to various attacks and proposed an alternative solution. In this paper, we show that both, Das's and Khan-Algahathbar's schemes have flaws and remain vulnerable to various attacks including stolen smart card attacks. To overcome the security weaknesses of both schemes, we propose an improved two-factor user authentication that is resilient to stolen smart card attacks as well as other common types of attacks. We provide security evaluation of the proposed protocols showing its robustness to various attacks and analyzed the scheme's performance to determine its efficiency. Compared to the previous schemes, it is proven more robust and provides better security.

Wireless sensor networks are widely used for applications such as environmental monitoring, airport safety, health care, etc. For user authentication, in 2009, Das proposed a two-factor user authentication scheme in wireless sensor networks. They claimed that this scheme provided efficiency, strong security, and user anonymity property. However, we find that Das's scheme is still vulnerable to masquerade attack and cannot achieve user anonymity. This paper will propose an improvement to remedy the weakness of Das's scheme.

The development of wireless sensor networks can be considered as the beginning of a new generation of applications. Authenticity of communicating entities is essential for the success of wireless sensor networks. Authentication in wireless sensor networks is always a challenging task due to broadcast nature of the transmission medium. Sensor nodes are usually resource constrained with respect to energy, memory, and computation and communication capabilities. It is not possible for each node to authenticate all incoming request messages, whether these request messages are from authorized or unauthorized nodes. Any malicious node can flood the network by sending messages repeatedly for creating denial of service attack, which will eventually bring down the whole network. In this paper, a lightweight authentication scheme named as Biphase Authentication Scheme (BAS) is presented for wireless sensor networks. This scheme provides initial small scale authentication for the request messages entering wireless sensor networks and resistance against denial of service attacks.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are one of the predominant backbone technologies for Internet of Things (IoTs). IoT enabled wireless sensor networks has sensor nodes and resource constrained sensor nodes are used for group communication in the form of multicasting for message deliveries rather than device-to-device communication. In order to secure the multicast group communication messages, it is essential to obtain an efficient key establishment and distribution scheme which maintains the integrity, and provides authenticity and confidentiality for the communication. This paper proposes two group key establishment and distribution protocols for secure multicast group communications between resource-constrained sensor nodes in IoT. Also, the relevance of the proposed protocols is examined based on three different performance parameters such as cost, overhead and packet loss using NS3 simulations based on different nodes.

In the resource constrained Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), the broadcast authentication is widely fulfilled by the emerging delayed authentication technique. The one level backward one-way key chain in the delayed authentication technique limits heavily the duration of the broadcast authentication. In this paper, we propose a long duration broadcast authentication scheme for WSNs. The proposed scheme uses a novel hierarchical key chain to extend the duration of broadcast authentication to be as long as the whole lifetime of WSNs. Moreover, the overhead of the proposed scheme is significantly reduced compared to that with one level key chain. Extensive experimental results show that the novel hierarchical key chain fully outperforms the one level key chain in terms of memory and computation.

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have been widely used in various applications. Since their sensor nodes are resource-constrained, key management is one of the most challenging issues in design of WSN. Currently, various efficient lightweight key management schemes have been proposed to enable encryption and authentication in WSN for different application scenarios. According to different requirements, it is important to select the trustworthy key management schemes in a WSN for setting up a fully trusted WSN mechanism. In this context, adaptive methods are required to evaluate those schemes. In this paper, we exploit Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to help with the complex decision.Specifically, we consider the following performance criteria: scalability, key connectivity, resilience, storage overhead, processing overhead and communication overhead. Our method is able help choosing a suitable scheme for given requirements.

Broadcast authentication is a critical security service in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, due to resource constrains of sensor nodes, providing authentication mechanism for broadcast message is difficult. ¿TESLA is a lightweight broadcast authentication protocol, which use a one-way hash chain and the delayed disclosure of keys to provide the authentication service. However, it suffers from several drawbacks in terms of time synchronization. In this paper, we propose a novel protocol, Chinese remainder theorem broadcast authentication (CRTBA), for wireless sensor networks. CRTBA uses Chinese Remainder Theorem to associate the authenticating procedure of the authentication key and the message authentication code of broadcast messages together. The proposed scheme has the advantage that no time synchronization is required and then the receiver can authentication packets instantly without buffering packets. The analysis shows that this scheme is efficient and practical, and can achiever better performance than the ¿TESLA.