28-11-2012, 01:31 PM
Providing End-to-End Secure Communications in Wireless Sensor Networks
Providing End-to-End Secure.pdf (Size: 421.19 KB / Downloads: 84)
Abstract
In many Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), providing
end to end secure communications between sensors and
the sink is important for secure network management. While
there have been many works devoted to hop by hop secure
communications, the issue of end to end secure communications
is largely ignored. In this paper, we design an end to end
secure communication protocol in randomly deployed WSNs.
Specifically, our protocol is based on a methodology called
differentiated key pre-distribution. The core idea is to distribute
different number of keys to different sensors to enhance the
resilience of certain links. This feature is leveraged during
routing, where nodes route through those links with higher
resilience. Using rigorous theoretical analysis, we derive an
expression for the quality of end to end secure communications,
and use it to determine optimum protocol parameters. Extensive
performance evaluation illustrates that our solutions can provide
highly secure communications between sensor nodes and the sink
in randomly deployed WSNs. We also provide detailed discussion
on a potential attack (i.e. biased node capturing attack) to our
solutions, and propose several countermeasures to this attack.
INTRODUCTION
WIRELESS Sensor Networks (WSNs) are envisaged
in military, emergency and surveillance applications
today, where sensor nodes need to send sensed data to the sink.
In many applications under hostile environment, sensor nodes
cannot be deployed deterministically and thus are randomly
deployed into the field. An important requirement in network
management of many mission critical applications is to secure
end to end sensor networks data from being eavesdropped by
the attacker. While there have been many works devoted to
hop by hop secure communications in WSNs, the issue of
end to end secure communications is largely ignored
BACKGROUND AND RELATED WORK
In this section, we provide a brief background on random
key pre-distribution schemes, attack models and performance
metrics in randomly deployed WSNs.
Basic Scheme: A well accepted scheme for secure
communications in randomly deployed WSNs is random key
pre-distribution (RKP) [1], where there are two stages. At
the key pre-distribution stage, each node is pre-distributed
with