Distributed Security Paradigm for Resource-constrained Wireless Sensors in the Context of Internet of Things (IoT)

• Main Author: Iqbal, Muhammad Aamir
• Language: EN
• Published: University of Louisiana at Lafayette 2017
• Subjects: Computer science
• Online Access: http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10254391

<p> This dissertation addresses new challenges in the Internet of Things (IoT) related to security and privacy. The current transition from legacy internet to Internet of Things leads to multiple changes in its communication paradigms. Today's Machine to Machine (M2M) and Internet of Things architectures further accentuated this trend, not only by involving wider architectures but also by adding heterogeneity, resource capabilities inconstancy, and autonomy to once uniform and deterministic systems and the issue of scalability within a WSN. Unlike internet servers, most of IoT components are characterized by low capabilities in terms of both energy and computing resources and thus, are unable to support complex security schemes. A direct use of existing key establishment protocols to initiate connections between two IoT entities may be impractical unless both endpoints are able to run the required (expensive) cryptographic primitives, thus leaving aside a whole class of resource constrained devices. In this dissertation, we propose novel security solution approaches for key establishments designed to reduce the requirements of existing security protocols in order to be supported by resource-constrained devices and for the scalability of sensors with a WSN in contest of IoT. We have investigated the feasibility of substituting the key management scheme of ZigBee stack by implementing LEAP+ to enhance its security and scalability capabilities in a WSN. LEAP+ is surprisingly well-suited to different types of network topologies, device types, and addressing modes offered by ZigBee stack, resolving the issue of scalability due to ZigBee&rsquo;s key management centralized approach, and our experimental results and performance evaluation parameters illustrated these facts. We designed new key establishment protocols for the constrained wireless sensors to delegate their heavy cryptographic load to less constrained nodes in their neighborhood, exploiting the spatial heterogeneity of IoT nodes. Allowing cooperation between sensor nodes may open the way to a new class of threats, known as internal attacks, that conventional cryptographic mechanisms fail to deal with. This introduces the concept of trustworthiness within a cooperative group. Proposed protocols aim to track nodes behaviors and past performances to detect their trustworthiness and select reliable ones for cooperative assistance. Sensor nodes&rsquo; trustworthiness is verified by accompanying them with an accelerometer to detect whether these cooperative sensors are installed on the same body. Based on an extensive analysis and their accelerometers&rsquo; data correlations with the base station (mobile phone in this case) accelerometer data, we identify a set of neighboring devices able to provide assistance in performing heavy asymmetric computations effectively without compromising the security of the whole system. Formal security and privacy verifications and performance analyses with respect to the resource-constrained sensor&rsquo;s energy are also conducted to ensure the security effectiveness and energy efficiency of our proposed protocols. </p><p>