Liu / Ning Security for Wireless Sensor Networks

2007
ISBN: 978-0-387-46781-8
Verlag: Springer US
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 1 - PDF Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 28, 220 Seiten, eBook

Reihe: Advances in Information Security

The recent technological advances have made it possible to deploy small, l- power, low-bandwidth, and multi-functional wireless sensor nodes to monitor and report the conditions and events in their local environments. A large collection of these sensor nodes can thus form a wireless sensor network in an ad hoc manner, creating a new type of information systems. Such sensor networks have recently emerged as an important means to study and interact with the physical world and have received a lot of attention due to their wide applications in military and civilian operations such as target tracking and data acquisition. However, in many of these applications, wireless sensor networks could be deployed in hostile environments where there are malicious attacks against the network. Providing security services in sensor networks, however, turns out to be a very challenging task. First, sensor nodes usually have limited resources such as storage, bandwidth, computation and energy. It is often undesirable to implement expensive algorithms (e. g. , frequent public key operations) on sensor nodes. Second, sensor nodes are usually deployed unattended and built without compromise prevention in mind. An attacker can easily capture and compromise a few sensor nodes without being noticed. When sensor nodes are compromised, the attacker can learn all the secrets stored on them and launch a variety of attacks. Thus, any security mechanism for sensor networks has to be resilient to compromised sensor nodes.

Zielgruppe

Professional/practitioner

Autoren/Hrsg.

Liu, Donggang

Ning, Peng

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Broadcast Authentication.- Pairwise Key Establishment.- Improving Pairwise Key Establishment Using Deployment Knowledge.- Secure Localization.- Summary and Future Work.

Leseproben

1.3.2 Pairwise Key Establishment (p. 5)
Pairwise key establishment is another important fundamental security service. It enables sensor nodes to communicate securely with each other using cryptographic techniques. The main problem here is to establish a secure key shared between two communicating sensor nodes. However, due to the resource con- straints on sensor nodes, it is not feasible for them to use traditional pairwise key establishment techniques such as public key cryptography and key distribution center (KDC).

Instead of the above two techniques, sensor nodes may establish keys between each other through key pre-distribution , where keying materials are pre-distributed to sensor nodes before deployment. As two extreme cases, one may setup a global key among the network so that two sensor nodes can establish a key based on this key, or one may assign each sensor node a unique random key with each of the other nodes. However, the former is vulnerable to the compromise of a single node, and the latter introduces huge storage overhead at sensor nodes.

Eschenauer and Gligor proposed a probabilistic key pre-distribution scheme recently for pairwise key establishment [20]. The main idea is to let each sensor node randomly pick a set of keys from a key pool before the deployment so that any two sensor nodes have a certain probability to share at least one common key. Chan et al. further extended this idea and developed two key pre-distribution techniques: a q-composite key pre-distribution scheme and a random pairwise keys scheme [12]. The q-composite key pre-distribution also uses a key pool but requires that two nodes compute a pairwise key from at least q pre-distributed keys that they share. The random pairwise keys scheme randomly picks pairs of sensor nodes and assigns each pair a unique random key. Both schemes improve the security over the basic probabilistic key pre-distribution scheme.

However, the pairwise key establishment problem is still not fully solved. For the basic probabilistic and the q-composite key pre-distribution schemes, as the number of compromised nodes increases, the fraction of affected pairwise keys increases quickly. As a result, a small number of compromised nodes may disclose a large fraction of pairwise keys. Though the random pairwise keys scheme does not suffer from the above security problem, given a memory constraint, the network size is strictly limited by the desired probability that two sensor nodes share a pairwise key, the memory available for keys on sensor nodes, and the number of neighbor nodes that a sensor node can communicate with. Techniques to address this problem are provided Chapter 3 and Chapter 4.

1.3.3 Security in Localization
Sensors' locations play a critical role in many sensor network applications. Not only do applications such as environment monitoring and target tracking require sensors' location information to fulfill their tasks, but several fundamental techniques developed for wireless sensor networks also require sensor nodes' locations. For example, in geographical routing protocols (e.g., GPSR [35] and GEAR [80]), sensor nodes make routing decisions at least partially based on their own and their neighbors' locations.