Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are ad-hoc networks consisting of tiny battery-
operated wireless sensors. The sensor nodes are lightweight in terms of memory,
computation, energy and communication. These networks are usually deployed in
unsecured, open, and harsh environments, where it is difficult for humans to perform
continuous monitoring. Consequently, it is very crucial to provide security mecha-
nisms for authenticating data among sensor nodes. Key management is a pre-requisite
for any security mechanism. Efficient distribution and management of keys in WSNs
is a challenging task. Many standard key establishment techniques have been pro-
posed using symmetric cryptosystems. Unfortunately, these systems often fail to pro-
vide a good trade-off between memory and security and since WSNs are lightweight
in nature, these cryptosystems are not feasible. On the other hand, public key in-
frastructure (PKI) is infeasible in WSNs because of its continuous requirement of a
trusted third party and heavy computational demands for certificate verification.
Pairing-Based Cryptography (PBC) has paved the way for how parties can agree
on keys without any interaction. It has relaxed the requirement of expensive certificate
verification on PKI systems. In this thesis, we propose a new hybrid identity-based
non-interactive key management protocol for WSNs, which leverages the benefits of
both symmetric key based cryptosystems and pairing-based cryptosystems. The pro-
posed protocol is scalable, suits many applications and can be deployed in multiple
types of networks without modifications. We also provide mechanisms for key refresh
when the network topology changes. A security analysis is presented to prove that
the scheme is resilient to many types of attacks. To validate our scheme, we have
implemented it on Crossbow TelosB motes running TinyOS and analyzed the perfor-
mance in terms of memory, communication, computation and energy consumption.
The results indicate that our scheme can be deployed efficiently to provide high level
of security in a large-scale network without increasing memory, communication and
energy overheads.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:NSHD.ca#10222/21683 |
| Date | 26 March 2013 |
| Creators | Rahman, Musfiq |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
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