In recent years, the considerable progress of miniaturization and the consequent increase of the efficiency of digital circuits has allowed a great diffusion of the wireless sensor network technology. This has led to the growth of applications and protocols for applying these networks to several scenarios, such as the military one, where it is essential to deploy security protocols in order to prevent opponents from accessing the information exchanged among sensor nodes. This paper analyzes security issues of data processed by the WSN and describes a system able to generate sequences of random numbers, which can be used by security algorithms and protocols. The proposed True Random Number Generator (TRNG) exploits measurements obtained from sensor nodes, in order to allow every node to produce random data upon request, without involving a trusted third party. The proposed TRNG behavior has been tested by carrying out the NIST tests, and the obtained experimental results indicate the high degree of randomness of the produced numbers.
Wireless networks need more security in comparison to the other networks due to their intrinsic vulnerabilities to possible attacks. It is expected that by using a distributed method for true random number generators (TRNG) in wireless sensor networks (WSN) and wireless LAN (WLAN) randomness quality of generated numbers can be enhanced. We analyze a protocol for a distributed TRNG named ScatterLight (L. R. Giuseppe, M. Fabrizio and O. Marco, 2011) for a WSN. After making some changes on ScatterLight structure and physical data sources, the Enhanced ScatterLight protocol is introduced; it provides secure and high qualified true random numbers. Thus, the quality of randomness of obtained random numbers using National Institute of Standards and Technology tests is evaluated. Finally, by analyzing the results, it can be conducted that Enhanced ScatterLight protocol in comparisons with ScatterLight protocol in WLAN and LAN provides 60% and 53% better randomness quality respectively, while the performance is equal in both protocols.
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are of prominent use in unmanned surveillance applications. This peculiar trait of WSNs is actually the underlying technology of various applications of the Internet of Things (IoT) such as smart homes, smart cities, smart shopping complexes, smart traffic, smart health, and much more. Over time, WSNs have evolved as a strong base for laying the foundations of IoT infrastructure. In order to address the scenario in which a user wants to access the real-time data directly from the sensor node in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), Das recently proposed an anonymity-preserving three-factor authentication protocol. Das's protocol is suitable for resource-constrained sensor nodes because it only uses lightweight cryptographic primitives such as hash functions and symmetric encryption schemes as building blocks. Das's protocol is claimed to be secure against different known attacks by providing formal security proof and security verification using the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications tool. However, we find that Das's protocol has the following security loopholes: (1) By using a captured sensor node, an adversary can impersonate a legal user to the gateway node, impersonate other sensor nodes to deceive the user, and the adversary can also decrypt all the cipher-texts of the user; (2) the gateway node has a heavy computational cost due to user anonymity and thus the protocol is vulnerable to denial of service (DoS) attacks. We overcome the shortcomings of Das's protocol and propose an improved protocol. We also prove the security of the proposed protocol in the random oracle model. Compared with the other related protocols, the improved protocol enjoys better functionality without much enhancement in the computation and communication costs. Consequently, it is more suitable for applications in WSNs.
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are used for a wide range of things these days, from watching the environment to improving healthcare systems. But because these networks are used everywhere, they are also open to security risks like spying, data corruption, and node capture. It is very important to address these issues in order to protect the accuracy, privacy, and access of data being sent. Information-theoretic security looks like a good way to deal with these problems because it uses mathematical models to make sure that transmission in WSNs is safe and uses little energy. This essay goes into detail about information-theoretic security in WSNs. It gives a full rundown of the mathematical basics and real-world implications for getting strong security in places with limited resources. The idea of "secrecy capacity" is at the heart of this method. It measures the highest rate at which authorized nodes can communicate privately while preventing spying foes. Utilizing the chance that exists in wireless channels, encrypted keys can be generated without using shared secrets, making them resistant to attempts that try to steal them. Because sensor nodes only have a short power life, energy economy is very important in WSNs. Information-theoretic security methods, like physical layer security and joint communication, are designed to use as little energy as possible while still providing strong security. Nodes can work together to improve signal strength and fight channel fading using cooperative methods. This makes the network last longer without compromising security. This article also talks about the trade-offs between security, energy savings, and communication performance in WSNs. This helps us figure out how to make the best transfer schemes.
A sensor network typically refers to a collection of sensor nodes equipped with sensing, communication and processing capabilities.It brings an opportunity to solve many difficult problems including real time monitoring, tracking, and controlling.While the applications of sensor networking become many and varied, security has always been one of the major concerns in real deployments.In this dissertation, we design physical primitives for secure communication in wireless sensor networks, and develop a wireless security framework to provide conventional security services.We investigate the feasibility of achieving perfect secrecy and information authenticity without shared secrets via two physical primitives: (i) cooperative jamming primitive, where we introduce a secure coding problem in which not only the sender but also the receiver participates in the coding.In essence, the receiver's role is to selectively jam the sender's transmission at the level of bits, bytes, or packets.We then design a class of secure codes, called "dialog codes", for diverse channel models and receiver models.(ii) spatial verification primitive, where we exploit the spatial signature induced by the radio communications of a node on its neighboring nodes, and design a spatial primitive that robustly and efficiently validates the authenticity of the source of messages.To address trust initialization, we propose a zero knowledge proof alternative that allows bootstrapping trust among individuals in a distributed way.
Abstract Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been heavily deployed to facilitate continuous monitoring of their environments as they collect the necessary data which enable autonomous decision making or predictive control. As such, these networks have found applications in fields such as smart agriculture, military, industrial automation, and healthcare. During the message transfers among sensors or between sensors and mobile sinks, public communication channels are deployed. This exposes the collected data to a myriad of security threats such as tampering, eavesdropping, and replay. Although the recent past has witnessed the development of numerous security frameworks for this ecosystem, most of the current solutions are defenseless against threats such as session hijacking, side-channeling, ephemeral secret leakages and quantum attacks. In this paper, we leverage on lattice cryptography to develop an effective authentication framework for the WSNs. Formal security analysis confirms the robustness of our protocol under the Random Oracle Model (ROM). In addition, extensive semantic security analyses demonstrate the resilience of the proposed framework against typical attacks such as denial of service, key compromise and forgery. In terms of performance, we show that the developed framework incurs slightly lower computation and energy overheads when compared with its peers.