LiSP: Lightweight Security Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

Funding Agencies: ONR/NRL, DARPA, NSF and Cisco

Project Description

Small low-cost sensor devices, each equipped with limited resources, are networked and used for various critical applications, especially those related to homeland security. These applications require the underlying sensor network to be secure even though it usually has to operate in a harsh and unattended environment where it is subject to eavesdropping, disruption of network services and manipulation of individual sensors. Moreover, ensuring high-level security is challenging due mainly to the severe resource constraints of sensors that do not allow the use of resource-demanding cryptographic algorithms, as well as the large-scale, cooperative nature of sensor networks that significantly increases overheads of secure processing.

With rapid advances in semiconductor and architectural technologies, the capabilities of embedded computing devices are improving at an exponential rate. This improvement leads to the increase in complexity and power consumption for them. By contrast, the battery and energy storage technologies improve at a much slower pace, failing to meet the ever-increasing energy demands of newer devices. Energy-efficiency is, therefore, a critical issue in all portable, embedded devices. Specifically, in certain environments, like sensor networks, where it is often very difficult to change or recharge batteries for devices, the energy-efficiency turns out to be the most important factor in the design of the system.

To address all these challenges, we propose to design, implement and evaluate a Lightweight Security Protocol (LiSP) that offers an energy-efficient security framework, consisting of the following core services:

• verification of program-integrity of each sensor when it joins the network or has experienced a long service blockage;
• key management and secure routing that securely share/establish the cryptographic keys among sensors, as well as supporting a secure geographic forwarding protocol;
• network intrusion detection tailored to resource-limited sensor networks that probes/ monitors network activities to uncover compromised/suspicious sensor devices; and
• security tradeoff that reconfigures the security layer based on the level of residual energy, making a tradeoff between security and energy-efficiency.

This research, if completed successfully, will achieve the fundamental advancement of secure networking technology that meets the requirements of both high-level security and energy-efficiency. Clearly, existing techniques (e.g., those based on public-key algorithms) are intended for environments equipped with sufficient computation power and storage space, and hence, cannot be used for low-cost sensor devices. The LiSP will augment such sensor devices to be usable for applications that require high-level security by saving as much energy as possible.

Publications

Xin Hu, Taejoon Park, and Kang G. Shin, "Attack-Tolerant Time Synchronization in Wireless Sensor Networks," in preparation.

Taejoon Park and Kang G. Shin, "Attack-Tolerant Localization via Iterative Verification of Locations in Sensor Networks," under revision.

Taejoon Park and Kang G. Shin, "Secure Routing Based on Distributed Key Sharing in Large-scale Sensor Networks," to appear in ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems, 2007.

Taejoon Park and Kang G. Shin, "On Building a Lightweight Security Architecture for Sensor Networks," LNCS 4097: Proceedings of EUC'06 Workshops, pp. 511-521, 2006.

Taejoon Park and Kang G. Shin, "Soft Tamper-Proofing via Program Integrity Verification in Wireless Sensor Networks," IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, vol. 4, no. 3, May/June 2005.

Taejoon Park and Kang G. Shin, "Optimal Tradeoffs for Location-Based Routing in Large-scale Ad Hoc Networks," IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, vol. 13, no. 2, April 2005.

Taejoon Park and Kang G. Shin, "LiSP: A Lightweight Security Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks," ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems, vol. 3, no. 3, August 2004.

-- Main.katchang - 22 Feb 2007