Improved Pairwise Key Establishment for Wireless Sensor Networks

A scheme for WSNs (wireless sensor networks) security is given by dividing sensing tetrahedron into clusters and using the symmetric polynomials in this paper.The sensing tetrahedron is divided into a number of small grids.All those sensor nodes, both ordinary sensor nodes and heterogeneous sensor nodes are distributed in the sensing tetrahedron.In a grid, all ordinary sensor nodes and heterogeneous sensor nodes establish their shared keys through using the symmetric polynomials.All the heterogeneous sensor nodes establish their shared keys through using the symmetric polynomials.At last, all sensor nodes establish their keys directly or indirectly in the whole sensing tetrahedron.Analysis and comparison demonstrate this scheme enhances the WSN security, has good network connectivity, saves node storage, reduces network computing load, and extends the network lifetime.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are novel large-scale wireless networks that consist of distributed, self organizing, low-power, low-cost, tiny sensor devices to cooperatively collect information through infrastructure less wireless networks. These networks are envisioned to play a crucial role in variety of applications like critical military surveillance applications, forest fire monitoring, commercial applications such as building security monitoring, traffic surveillance, habitat monitoring and smart homes and many more scenarios. Node capture attack is one of the most dreadful security attack exist in wireless sensor networks. An adversary steals cryptographic key or other confidential information like node’s id etc from a captured node to compromise entire network. So, Security of wireless sensor network is an important issue for maintaining confidentiality and integrity of wireless links. Now-a-days, researchers are paying attention towards developing security schemes against Node capture attack. Our survey provides deep insights of existing techniques that enhance the attacking efficiency of the node capture attack in wireless sensor network. It also analyzes various detection and key predistribution schemes for inventing a new scheme to improve resilience against node capture attack.

Key management in sensor networks is the core security protocols for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in the hostile environment. Due to the resource constraints, pre-distribution secrets keys into sensor nodes before they are deployment are an applicable approach. Several key pre-distribution schemes have been proposed in literature to establish pairwise keys between sensor nodes. However, as the number of compromised nodes increases, the fraction of affected pairwise keys increase quickly. These vulnerabilities are exacerbated when WSNs have to operate unattended in a hostile environment. In such an environment, an adversary may control the network by capturing some sensor nodes.. To address these weaknesses, we present a promising pairwise key establishment scheme in this paper. In the proposed scheme, after pairwise key establishment all attackers can’t get any key information of uncompromised sensor nodes from compromised sensors. The analysis shows that compared with existing approaches, our scheme have better networks resilience against node capture attack.

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

In-network data aggregation plays an important role to reduce the transmitting energy and data redundancy in large scale sensor networks. However, the security of wireless sensor networks is a challenging problem in the process of data aggregation. An efficient secure data aggregation is proposed to enhance the data security of wireless sensor networks. Firstly, the secure in-network aggregation tree is introduced, then a judgment method based on trust schema was used to detect whether a sensor node has potential misbehavior. After the detection, a local recovery schema is proposed to reduce the possibility to become isolated nodes, which will increase the security level in data aggregation in wireless sensor networks. The performance analysis shows the efficiency of the schema.

Security of wireless sensor networks is a major issue to protect sensor nodes from the attacker. Key management or key pre-distribution (KPS) is the preliminary step in the security of a sensor network, where secret keys are loaded into the sensor node’s memory before placement of the node in target positions. Various schemes for KPS have been proposed for location dependent as well as location independent wireless sensor networks. Costas arrays are $$n \times n$$ matrices grid represented where dots are placed for the l’s and leave blanks for the 0’s of the matrix for a positive integer n with the property that the vectors connecting two dots of the grid are all distinct as vectors. Costas arrays have a wide range of application including the construction of sonar signal pattern, cryptography, etc. Due to the Costas arrays property of uniqueness among their elements, it can be used in key pre-distribution of wireless sensor networks, especially in a location-dependent grid-based network. In this paper, we have proposed a Costas array based key pre-distribution scheme. Simulations are done on different network scenarios and the results were analyzed. Comparative performance analysis of the scheme is shown for different grid sized network considering various order of Costas array.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are usually deployed in hostile or unattended areas, and users need to obtain real-time data from WSNs. The data collected by sensor nodes are usually relatively private and sensitive, so users must pass the identity authentication before obtaining the information perceived by sensor nodes. In order to enhance the security of wireless sensor networks and prevent illegal users from accessing sensor nodes, this paper designs an efficient and secure identity authentication protocol for wireless sensor networks. The proposed protocol makes full use of the advantages of lightweight cryptographic primitives such as physical unclonable function, one-way hash function and bitwise exclusive operation. Moreover, users only need to use biometrics (such as fingerprints, iris) to access the remote systems and do not need to rely on any password, which avoids the trouble of memorizing and losing password. To prove the scheme’s security, the well-known formal security proof with random oracle model and traditional heuristic discussion are given. Additionally, the performance comparison results show that our scheme has less communication overhead and computation complexity, and is effective for the resource constrained sensor devices in WSNs.

Key management is a major challenge to achieve security in wireless sensor networks. Previous research on sensor network security mainly considers homogeneous sensor networks, where all sensor nodes have the same capabilities. The recent research has shown that the survivability of the homogeneous sensor network can be improved if sensor nodes are grouped in clusters in which a powerful cluster head assigned. In this paper, we adopt a Heterogeneous Sensor Network (HSN) model for better performance and security. We proposed a novel key management scheme, which utilizes Elliptic Curve Cryptography and the t-degree trivariate symmetric polynomial in the design of an efficient key management scheme for sensor nodes. In addition, we also design a dynamic key update technique based on one-way hash chain and Time Slice mechanism which significantly reduced the communication overhead in key agreement and update phase. The performance evaluation and security analysis show that the proposed key management scheme can provide perfect resilience against node capture and scalability with significant saving on communication overhead and storage space.

Being one of the main technologies for Internet of Things (IoT), wireless sensor network is absolutely critical and plays an increasingly important role in the development of Internet of Things. Wireless sensor network is mobile network composed of sensor nodes with limited resources, like computation capability, energy, memory storage, and communication capability. Its characteristic results in that the security of wireless sensor network faces a great challenge. Hence, the security of wireless sensor network is an important issue for the development of IoT and shall be focused on. In this paper, a novel authentication scheme is proposed for wireless sensor networks based on theory of quadratic residues. It is making the use of master key to achieve simple symmetric cryptographic primitives and authentication operation and reach the aims of great resistance against the attacks and low energy consumption. Then the proposed scheme is compared with other network-wide key management schemes, obtaining better results in the aspects of security, efficiency, and scalability.

In this paper, wireless sensor network (WSN) security issue in the presence of an eavesdropper is analysed. The sensor-sink as well as sensor-eavesdropper channels are assumed to be subjected to generalized-K fading. According to the physical layer security framework, we employ round-robin, optimal sensor and cumulative distribution function-based scheduling scheme to enhance secure connection between sensor nodes and to attain low probability of intercept. Novel analytical results are given in a form of easy-to-compute analytical expressions for the intercept probability. Additionally, asymptotic closed-form expressions are derived and diversity orders of scheduling schemes are determined. Numerical results demonstrate important impacts of fading and shadowing parameters of main and wiretap links, network size and selected scheme on WSN security. Presented results are validated by independent Monte Carlo simulations.

Preferential attachment models have been widely studied in complex networks, because they can explain the formation of many networks like social networks, citation networks, power grids, and biological networks, to name a few. Motivated by the application of key predistribution in wireless sensor networks (WSN), we initiate the study of preferential attachment with degree bound. Our paper has two important contributions to two different areas. The first is a contribution in the study of complex networks. We propose preferential attachment model with degree bound for the first time. In the normal preferential attachment model, the degree distribution follows a power law, with many nodes of low degree and a few nodes of high degree. In our scheme, the nodes can have a maximum degree $d_{\max}$, where $d_{\max}$ is an integer chosen according to the application. The second is in the security of wireless sensor networks. We propose a new key predistribution scheme based on the above model. The important features of this model are that the network is fully connected, it has fewer keys, has larger size of the giant component and lower average path length compared with traditional key predistribution schemes and comparable resilience to random node attacks. We argue that in many networks like key predistribution and Internet of Things, having nodes of very high degree will be a bottle-neck in communication. Thus, studying preferential attachment model with degree bound will open up new directions in the study of complex networks, and will have many applications in real world scenarios.

The security of wireless sensor networks is a significant concern and can be achieved by the application of cryptographic algorithms. The symmetric key encryption techniques are widely used cryptographic mechanisms for the security of sensor networks due to its low computational complexity. A symmetric key encryption technique requires a secret key to be shared between both parties for confidential communication. In a wireless sensor network, it is difficult to know which node is going to be in its communication range at the deployment phase. If prior knowledge of sensor location exists, it is an added advantage and helps in the distribution of secret keys among nodes. Even if with the expected location information, distributing the keys properly among the nodes is a challenging task. A proper algorithm must be used so that it gives the adequate utilization of the distributed keys with a minimal number of keys per sensor node. In this paper, we propose a location-dependent key distribution scheme. We use Delaunay Triangulation for the efficient distribution of keys among sensor nodes. The method gives a high probability of secure communication links among nodes with high resilience to the network.

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.

Security in wireless sensor networks is very crucial especially whenever they deployed in military applications. Cryptography is used to protect sensitive information from disclosure. Key management is important component in cryptography. Cryptography is not useful if keys are disclosed to attackers. Designing an efficient key management for WSN is a difficult task because of scarcity of computing, communication, and memory resources. An efficient key distribution approach is proposed by using mobile agent paradigm rather than client–server model. The proposed approach will use good features of both symmetric and asymmetric cryptography. Mobile agents are used to generate public and private key pairs, update keys, and revocation of keys. The proposed scheme in the first level will use mobile agents for key distribution and coordination for asymmetric keys, and in the second level, sensor nodes can involve in constructing symmetric keys for secure communication through mutual authentication and encryption with those keys. The proposed method is implemented using NS2 simulator, and results are compared with existing similar methods in terms of evaluation parameters like communication, computation overhead, memory overhead, and resiliency. The performance of proposed method is improved when it is compared with similar existing methods.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have recently attracted a lot of interest in the research community due their wide range of applications. Due to distributed nature of these networks and their deployment in remote areas, these networks are vulnerable to numerous security threats that can adversely affect their proper functioning. This problem is more critical if the network is deployed for some mission-critical applications such as in a tactical battlefield. Random failure of nodes is also very likely in real-life deployment scenarios. Due to resource constraints in the sensor nodes, traditional security mechanisms with large overhead of computation and communication are infeasible in WSNs. Security in sensor networks is, therefore, a particularly challenging task. This paper discusses the current state of the art in security mechanisms for WSNs. Various types of attacks are discussed and their countermeasures presented. A brief discussion on the future direction of research in WSN security is also included.