STaR: Security Transparency and Reconfigurability for Wireless Sensor Networks Programming

Roberta Daidone, Gianluca Dini, Marco Tiloca

2013

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are prone to security attacks. To protect the network from potential adversaries, it is necessary to secure communications between sensor nodes. If we consider a network of heterogeneous objects including WSNs, security requirements may be far more complex. A single application may deal with different traffic flows, each one of which may have different security requirements, that possibly change over time. In this paper, we present STaR, a software component which provides security transparency and reconfigurability for WSNs programming. STaR allows for securing multiple traffic flows at the same time according to specified security policies, and is transparent to the application, i.e. no changes to the original application or the communication protocol are required. STaR can be easily reconfigured at runtime, thus coping with changes of security requirements. Finally, we present our implementation of STaR for Tmote Sky motes, and evaluate it in terms of memory occupancy, communication overhead, and energy consumption.

References

  1. Albano, M., Chessa, S., and Di Pietro, R. (2008). Information Assurance in Critical Infrastructures via Wireless Sensor Networks. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Information Assurance and Security, pages 305-310.
  2. Buttyan, L., Gessner, D., Hessler, A., and Langendoerfer, P. (2010). Application of wireless sensor networks in critical infrastructure protection: challenges and design options. IEEE Wireless Communications, 17(5):44-49.
  3. Cardenas, A.A., Roosta, T., and Sastry, S. (2009). Rethinking security properties, threat models, and the design space in sensor networks: a case study in SCADA systems. Ad Hoc Networks, 7(8):1434-1447.
  4. CONET (2008). Cooperating Objects NETwork of excellence, European Commission, 7th Framework Programme, Grant Agreement n. 224053. http://www.cooperating-objects.eu/.
  5. Crossbow Technology Inc. (2004). MPR/MIB User's Manual.
  6. Daidone, R., Dini, G., and Tiloca, M. (2012). STaR implementation source code. http://www.iet.unipi.it/g.dini/ download/code/star.zip.
  7. Dini, G., and Savino, I.M. (2010). A Security Architecture for Reconfigurable Networked Embedded Systems. International Journal of Wireless Information Networks, 17:11-25.
  8. Dini, G., and Tiloca, M. (2010). Considerations on Security in ZigBee Networks. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Sensor Networks, Ubiquitous, and Trustworthy Computing, pages 58-65.
  9. Eastlake, D., and Jones, P. (2001). http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3174.
  10. RFC 3174.
  11. Gu, W., Dutta, N., Chellappan, S., and Xiaole, B. (2011). Providing End-to-End Secure Communications in Wireless Sensor Networks. IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, 8(3):205-218.
  12. Hyun, S., Ning, P., Liu, A., and Du, W. (2008). Seluge: Secure and DoS-Resistant Code Dissemination in Wireless Sensor Networks. In Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks, pages 445-456.
  13. IEEE (2006). IEEE Std. 802.15.4-2006. IEEE, Inc., New York.
  14. Karlof, C., Sastry, N., and Wagner, D. (2004). TinySec: a link layer security architecture for wireless sensor networks. In Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, pages 162-175.
  15. Lanigan, P.E., and Gandhi, R., and Narasimhan, P. (2006). Sluice: Secure Dissemination of Code Updates in Sensor Networks. In Proceedings of the 26th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, pages 53-62.
  16. Maerien, J., Michiels, S., Huygens, C., and Joosen, W. (2010). MASY: MAnagement of Secret keYs for federated mobile wireless sensor networks. In Proceedings of the 6th IEEE International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Computing, Networking and Communications, pages 121-128.
  17. Matthys, N., Huygens, C., Hughes, D., Michiels, S., and Joosen, W. (2012). A Component and Policy-Based Approach for Efficient Sensor Network Reconfiguration. In Proceedings of the 2012 IEEE International Symposium on Policies for Distributed Systems and Networks, pages 53-60.
  18. Moteiv Corporation (2006). Tmote iv Low Power Wireless Sensor Module.
  19. PLANET (2010). PLAtform for the deployment and operation of heterogeneous NETworked cooperating objects, European Commission, 7th Framework Programme, Grant Agreement n. 257649. http://www.planet-ict.eu/.
  20. Su, Z., Lin, C., Ren, F., Jiang, Y., and Chu, X. (2009). An Efficient Scheme for Secure Communication in LargeScale Wireless Sensor Networks. In Proceedings of the 2009 WRI International Conference on Communications and Mobile Computing, volume 3, pages 333- 337.
  21. Texas Instruments (2012). CC2420 2.4 GHz IEEE 802.15.4 / ZigBee ready RF Transceiver. http://focus.ti.com/lit/ ds/symlink/cc2420.pdf.
  22. TinyOS Working Group (2012). http://www.tinyos.net/.
  23. U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) (1998). SKIPJACK and KEA algorithm specifications.
  24. Wong, C.K., Gouda, M., and Lam, S.S. (2000). Secure group communications using key graphs. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 8(1):16-30.
  25. ZigBee Alliance (2008). ZigBee Specification.
Download


Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

Daidone R., Dini G. and Tiloca M. (2013). STaR: Security Transparency and Reconfigurability for Wireless Sensor Networks Programming . In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Sensor Networks - Volume 1: SENSORNETS, ISBN 978-989-8565-45-7, pages 35-40. DOI: 10.5220/0004205200350040


in Bibtex Style

@conference{sensornets13,
author={Roberta Daidone and Gianluca Dini and Marco Tiloca},
title={STaR: Security Transparency and Reconfigurability for Wireless Sensor Networks Programming},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Sensor Networks - Volume 1: SENSORNETS,},
year={2013},
pages={35-40},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0004205200350040},
isbn={978-989-8565-45-7},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Sensor Networks - Volume 1: SENSORNETS,
TI - STaR: Security Transparency and Reconfigurability for Wireless Sensor Networks Programming
SN - 978-989-8565-45-7
AU - Daidone R.
AU - Dini G.
AU - Tiloca M.
PY - 2013
SP - 35
EP - 40
DO - 10.5220/0004205200350040