AEGIS: a lightweight firewall for wireless sensor networks

  • Authors:

  • Mohammad Sajjad Hossain;Vijay Raghunathan

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN;School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN

  • Venue:
  • DCOSS'10 Proceedings of the 6th IEEE international conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Firewalls are an essential component in today’s networked computing systems (desktops, laptops, and servers) and provide effective protection against a variety of over-the-network security attacks. With the development of technologies such as IPv6 and 6LoWPAN that pave the way for Internet-connected embedded systems and sensor networks, these devices will soon be subject to (and need to be defended against) similar security threats. As a first step, this paper presents Aegis, a lightweight, rule-based firewall for networked embedded systems such as wireless sensor networks. Aegis is based on a semantically rich, yet simple, rule definition language. In addition, Aegis is highly efficient during operation, runs in a transparent manner from running applications, and is easy to maintain. Experimental results obtained using real sensor nodes and cycle-accurate simulations demonstrate that Aegis successfully performs gatekeeping of a sensor node’s communication traffic in a flexible manner with minimal overheads.