A Security Framework for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN ) are networks composed of small, wireless, battery-powered and sensor- equipped nodes, called motes. Thank to their characteristics, WSNs are often adopted as monitoring plat- forms in environments where the deployment of conventional networks are unfeasible. Typical applications of WSNs can be found in the smart home scenarios, in industrial applications, in safety-related and in military contexts. The reference protocol stack for WSNs is the IEEE 802.15.4 [1], which defines the first two layers of the ISO/OSI network stack (PHY and MAC). Providing security in WSNs is a non-trivial challenge: the performance limitations, the limited amount of storage and the finite energy resources cause the implementation of well-known state-of-art security solutions to be unfeasible. The IEEE 802.15.4 standard defines some security-related specifications, but they do not cover all the WSNs security issues. In order to provide a complete solution for WSN security, we propose a framework to provide a set of lightweight security solutions which take WSN constrains into account. In particular: • we address the confidentiality security requirement by mean of a set of lightweight cryptographic schemes based on hybrid cryptography, Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and new key transport pro- tocols; at the same time, we introduce a hardware accelerator to overcome the performance limitations; • we address the need for dynamic security checks on the WSN with the improvement of a misuse-based WSN Intrusion Detection System; • we address the integrity requirements of both data and WSN motes by introducing a novel lightweight anti-tampering mechanism based on the blockchain technology; • finally, we use an enhanced version of a famous mobile-agent middleware for WSN. The new version support additional features (e.g. energy-awareness) and integrate all the above techniques to build up a complete secure platform based on mobile agents for WSN.