ENABLING END-TO-END SECURITY USING IPSEC IN WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

• Main Author: Varadarajan, Prabhakar
• Format: Others
• Published: OpenSIUC 2013
• Online Access: https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/theses/1306; https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2320&context=theses

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are becoming increasingly more integrated with the Internet. Successful deployments of wireless sensor networks that are connected to the Internet require secure end-to-end communication paths. Though various aspects of WSNs security have been addressed in prior works, ensuring true end-to-end (E2E) security between IPv6 enabled sensor networks and the Internet remains an open research issue. In this thesis the implemented 6LoWPAN adaptation layer was extended to support both IPsec's Authentication Header (AH) and Encapsulation Security Payload (ESP). Thus, the communication endpoints in WSNs were able to communicate securely using encryption and authentication. The proposed AH and ESP compressed headers in 6LoWPAN for IPv6 communications on IEEE 802.15.4 networks were evaluated through test-bed experimentation. The utilization of IPv6 in WSNs facilitates unique IP addressing among the wireless sensor nodes thus allowing full integration with the Internet. As a result of this, WSN can play a significant role in the emerging paradigm of the `Internet of Things' (IoT). This thesis brings us one step closer to this paradigm by comprehensively evaluating a lightweight implementation of IPsec on WSN that ensures end-to-end security.