Authentication in Mobile Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is an area of great interest to both academia and industry. WSNs raise a large number of military, industrial, scientific, civilian and commercial applications to another level, allowing cost effective sensing, especially where human observation or traditional sensors would be undesirable, inefficient, expensive, or dangerous. Even from their earliest applications, sensor networks have been targeted for attack by adversaries with interest in intercepting the data being sent, or in reducing the ability of the network to carry out its mission. There are a lot of possible attacks against WSNs, which have different objectives, are performed at different levels, and result in different consequences. Wireless sensors have limited energy and computational capabilities, making many traditional security methodologies difficult or impossible to be utilized. Also, they are often deployed in open unattended areas, allowing physical attacks such as jamming, node capture and tampering. On the other hand, logical attacks include the HELLO flooding attack, the Sybil attack, the sinkhole attack, the wormhole attack, the blackhole attack, and the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. Significant research effort is done to address all these problems. However, providing a security countermeasure for every possible attack would result in a huge security overhead, which is difficult to afford and would overwhelm the scarce resources available on sensor nodes. Despite the extensive scientific research, there is no standard procedure to help developers to choose the appropriate security scheme for their applications. The scale of deployment of a wireless sensor network requires careful decisions and trade-offs among various security measures. Sensor Network Security (SNS) is a growing field of research that presents researchers with challenging goals under tight design constraints. The need for creative and innovative security protocols is clear, since current security mechanisms are too resource intensive in terms of power, memory and processing capabilities of sensor network nodes. hus, before trying to design a secure communication mechanism, it is vital to properly study and understand the WSN architecture, the hardware and software specifications of the sensor nodes, the deployment environment, the production cost, the advantages and mostly the limitations, which could influence the WSN design. In this framework was this thesis elaborated. Particular emphasis is given to the security requirement of authentication. Before allowing a node to access real-time data from another sensor node, authentication must be ensured. The proposed scheme provides mutual authentication of the sensor nodes, with the use of sinusoidal functions which operate as pseudorandom number generators, keeping in mind the nodes’ limited computational, power and communication capabilities.