Wireless sensor networks are employed in a wide range of applications including disaster relief operations, forest-fire detection, battlefield surveillance, pollution measurement, and healthcare applications. Because of the characteristics of these applications, a wireless sensor network is more vulnerable to security threats than traditional networks. In order to protect the sensor network from outside attacks, it is necessary to implement a cryptographic mechanism that can achieve three major security objectives: confidentiality, integrity and authentication. Even though the topic of cryptography has been well studied for traditional networks, many conventional cryptographic approaches cannot easily be applied to sensor networks. To illustrate, public key-based schemes and even some symmetric key methods are complex with regards to computations, memory, communication, and packet size requirements. On the other hand, sensor networks suffer from severe constraints on their available resources as a result of the necessity to increase the lifetime of the complete network, minimize the physical size of the sensor nodes, and reduce the cost of sensor nodes. Consequently, it is important to propose cryptographic solutions designed specifically for wireless sensor networks.
A fundamental element in an effective cryptographic system is how sensor nodes are equipped with the cryptographic keys needed to create secure radio connections with their local neighbours. This thesis contributes to the challenging field of key establishment by introducing three key agreement schemes whose memory, processing, and communication requirements are low. These methods utilize the concept of third parties, and sometimes also deployment knowledge, to reduce the cryptographic burden of public-key based schemes and the key management overhead of symmetric key approaches. The proposed methods employ just a few simple hash operations in the sensor nodes. Furthermore, additional nodes called third parties are deployed to assist sensor nodes in the key establishment phase. Our key agreement schemes have many advantages over existing approaches. For instance, a sensor node in these schemes needs to make just a few local contacts to establish a secure radio connection with its neighbours with very high probability. In addition, the majority of sensor nodes must store only a small number of secret keys in their memory. These methods also employ an authentication mechanism to prevent impersonation attacks. / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uvic.ca/oai:dspace.library.uvic.ca:1828/3625 |
| Date | 18 October 2011 |
| Creators | Almowuena, Saleh |
| Contributors | Gulliver, T. Aaron |
| Source Sets | University of Victoria |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Rights | Available to the World Wide Web |
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