A cryptographic scheme for real-world wireless sensor networks applications

S. Marchesani, L. Pomante, F. Santucci, M. Pugliese
2013 Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 4th International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems - ICCPS '13  
This work deals with the cryptographic aspect of security applied to the WSN domain. In particular, it proposes a novel cryptographic scheme compliant to security requirements of real-world WSN applications (i.e. with very limited system resources). The proposed scheme exploits benefits from both symmetric and asymmetric ones where the keys, for each communicating node pairs, can be generated only if such nodes have been authenticated with respect to the network topology. In fact, the design of
more » ... traditional secure networks is often based on asymmetric encryption. In such networks, the amount of available computational, memory and power resources make it possible to ignore the main pitfall of this strategy: the robustness of asymmetric algorithms is highly dependent on the length of the keys; length that affects the complexity of the involved algorithms. However, when computational resources are limited, asymmetric cryptography could be not feasible and symmetric cryptography must be revalued. In such a case, the most important problem to solve is keys management. As a main difference with respect to existing approaches, the proposed scheme doesn't rely on the pre-distribution of keys but it is based on their dynamic generation exploiting partial information stored on nodes. Then, through computationally inexpensive operations, a node can compute the decrypt/encrypt key in a single phase with no steps of setup/negotiation. Furthermore, the proposed approach allows to authenticate a message with respect to a set of planned network topologies. For this, it has been called TAK2 (Topology
doi:10.1145/2502524.2502568 dblp:conf/iccps/MarchesaniPSP13 fatcat:ycktusih5vdhpi7tcrtfat4254