An enhanced security architecture for wireless sensor network

• Authors: Sherin M. Youssef;A. Baith Mohamed;Mark A. Mikhail
• Venue: DNCOCO'09 Proceedings of the 8th WSEAS international conference on Data networks, communications, computers
• Year: 2009

This paper introduces an enhanced secure sensor network architecture that provides the basic properties of data secrecy, authentication, and replay protection, with Low energy consumption overhead and relatively high security level. A novel Pairwise Key based security architecture. A block cipher mode of operation will be employed that provides both secrecy and authenticity in only one pass over the message data. The Offset Codebook Block cipher mode (OCB) based on Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryption mode will be employed. An enhanced Pairwise Key establishment scheme is proposed that assures that, even when some number of nodes has been compromised, the remainder of the network remains fully secure. Only a few bits of an Initialization Vector (IV) will be sent, while retaining the security of a full-length IV per packet. In contrast, previous approaches require two passes over the plaintext (one for encryption and one for authentication) and transmission of the full-length IV. The proposed architecture will support both the single - source communication and multi - source broad cast communication. Different encryption modes will be used with different key lengths and different initial vectors settings. More over, the cipher text will be filtered by an enhanced filter level such as Bloom filter and windowing. The Proposed mechanism will be robust subject to the resource constraints of the sensor network such as energy, memory, and computational speed. The improvement in security level comes at the cost of a modest increase in memory size, which is a desirable tradeoff in sensor nodes. Thus, the design tradeoffs in the proposed model make it well-suited for current state-of the- art sensor devices.