Secure Multi-Purpose Wireless Sensor Networks

• Main Author: Jacobi, Daniel
• Format: Others
• Language: German; en
• Published: 2016
• Online Access: https://tuprints.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/5249/1/20160322-DissJacobi-ULB.pdf; Jacobi, Daniel <http://tuprints.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/view/person/Jacobi=3ADaniel=3A=3A.html> (2016): Secure Multi-Purpose Wireless Sensor Networks.Darmstadt, Technische Universität Darmstadt, [Ph.D. Thesis]

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) were made possible around the late 1990s by industry scale availability of small and energy efficient microcontrollers and radio interfaces. Application areas for WSNs range from agriculture to health care and emergency response scenarios. Depending on the scenario a sensor network can span from some rooms to an area of several square miles in size and so the number of sensor nodes can vary from a fistful of nodes to hundreds or thousands. Sensor nodes are composed from a set of building blocks: processing, communication, sensing/actuating and a power supply. The power supply is usually a battery pack. Especially these limited energy resources make it tremendously important to save resources to achieve a long lifetime. Today’s WSNs are usually planned and developed to satisfy only one application, and they are controlled by a single user. But, with the Internet of Things approaching, more and more sensor networks will be used for multiple tasks simultaneously and are reaching larger sizes. As sensor networks grow it becomes mandatory to localize traffic, both for energy conservation as well as security. Additionally, the broadcast medium of the wireless channel of WSNs allows an adversary all sorts of attacks, like eavesdropping, replaying messages, and denial of service attacks. In large or unattended networks it is even possible to physically attack the hardware of a sensor node to gain access to its firmware and cryptographic keys. In this work we propose the Scopes Framework and the security enhancement Sec- Scopes. The Scopes Framework introduces dynamic partitioning of a WSN with support for multiple in-network tasks. SecScopes enables secure access control, key exchange and communication. The partitioning is done by a scoping mechanism which allows the dynamic defini- tion of subsets of sensor nodes. The Scopes Framework supports in-network tasks by managing network connections for each task, and allowing the selection of efficient routing algorithms. To allows access control on a partition of the network we introduce attribute-based encryption in sensor networks. Secure key exchange is also based on this encryption scheme. To secure communication more efficient symmetric cryptography is employed. With the Scopes Framework we provide a modular and flexible architecture that can be adjusted to the needs of different scenarios. We present a detailed evaluation of the performance of the framework and compare and discuss the results for the different stages of the framework. The results of the evaluation show the general feasibility of the approach, in spite of the adverse resource constraints.