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E3SN
Efficient Security Scheme for Sensor Networks
Hassan Noura, Steven Martin and Khaldoun Al Agha
Labaratoire de Recherche en Informatique, Universit´e Paris-Sud CNRS, Paris, France
Keywords:
Secure Wirless Sensor Networks, Data Integrity and Confidentiality.
Abstract:
Sensor networks are widely used in various areas and applications, and the need for effective security systems
is increasingly essential. But most security systems are based on complex algorithms that require a high
complexity and energy consumption, thus have undesirable consequences. To reduce them, a new security
system called E3SN is defined. It is based on an invertible and flexible key dependent matrix to mix the
contents of the packets. Our proposal can achieve simultaneously the information’s confidentiality, packet’s
integrity and source’s authentication, with a minimum of computational complexity, communication overhead
and memory consumption. This matrix is secret and only the transmitter and receiver can produce it in counter
mode. We evaluate our system by comparing E3SN to AES algorithm, considered reliable and robust in
several standards of sensor networks such as ZigBee, WirelessHART and ISA100.11a. The results show that
the proposed technique is much more efficient than AES, with the same quality of cryptography.
1 INTRODUCTION
Recently, the security of Wireless Sensor Networks
(WSN) is becoming principal for researchers and in-
dustry. These kinds of communication are suscepti-
ble to several attacks. The existing attacks can be
divided into two classes: active and passive. The
passive attacks can seriously impair the confidential-
ity of data, while the active attacks can damage their
authentication. Moreover, The nature of passive at-
tacks makes them rather difficult to be detected com-
pared to the active ones. The active attacks may in-
sert, delete or modify packet contents while passive
aim to know them. Encrypting packets among sen-
sor nodes can solve the problems of passive attacks,
but it requires a distributed scheme and a robust key
exchange. The traditional scheme uses symmetric
key cryptography for data encryption, while it pro-
vides efficient memory and computational complexity
compared to Asymmetric Key Cryptography (AKC).
AKC is used for the secret key communication among
sensor nodes. Secured services such as data confi-
dentiality, integrity and source authentication are es-
sential for safe WSN transmission. The confidential-
ity can be achieved using symmetric key cipher like
the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) (Daemen
et al., 1998). This algorithm is not only known for its
robustness, but also for its complexity and time con-
suming in WSN. In addition, the family of SHA (200,
2002) (e.g. SHA-2, SHA-512) is used to ensure data
integrity while HMAC (Krawczyk et al., 1997) for
source authentication. Moreover, some security pro-
tocols have been presented to provide security so-
lution like IPSec as in (Doraswamy and Harkins,
1999), and others (Perrig et al., 2002), (Karlof et al.,
2004), (Luk et al., 2007), (Rogaway et al., 2001) es-
pecially for WSN.
However, the security of WSN suffers from var-
ious limitations such as higher memory consump-
tion, computation overhead, and power consumption.
Also, it may require a communication overhead. In
general, major techniques of secure WSN have a
trade-off between security and performance. They are
attempting to design a secure Shannon network, but
this causes a decrease in the throughput. The WSN
limitations require cipher scheme with low computa-
tion complexity. This provokes a hard challenge with
the available resource constraints. This paper presents
a new efficient and robust security scheme that attains
low complexity computation. Compared to previous
works, a new technique based on the mixing of sev-
eral packets in a secret dynamic manner is proposed.
Therefore, it can solve the above challenge. The mix-
ing process is realized by using a new method of key
dependent, flexible and invertible matrix. The overall
computation complexity is reduced to one mixing it-
eration in packet level. In addition, a new header is in-
troduced for each packet with 8 bytes length. The ba-
615
Noura H., Martin . and Al Agha K..
E3SN - Efficient Security Scheme for Sensor Networks.
DOI: 10.5220/0004613006150621
In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Security and Cryptography (SECRYPT-2013), pages 615-621
ISBN: 978-989-8565-73-0
Copyright
c
2013 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)