Security applications for wireless sensor networks

• Grant number: 13/09059-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: July 01, 2013
• End date: February 28, 2014
• Field of knowledge: Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Computer Science - Computer Systems
• Principal Investigator: Cíntia Borges Margi
• Grantee: Talita Rodrigues Santos
• Host Institution: Escola Politécnica (EP). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Wireless networks in general, and the ones that uses sensors particularly, are valuable technologies for the development of applications in diverse areas such as environmental monitoring, health and social networks. Given the widespread use of this kind of sensors, the need of providing security services like confidentiality, authenticity and integrity was made present. With this need, diverse kinds of architectures that provides security in sensors was proposed. We know that wireless sensors have limited hardware resources such as memory, power and performance, in literature we can find a lot of symmetric security architectures, once those have less processing and memory requirements. One of them is called ETEWSN-Sec (http://www.larc.usp.br/~cbmargi/seg-rssf/), currently in application layer, that allows not only the end-to-end security in communication but the interoperability of services between different security systems and greater flexibility in the distribution of cryptographic keys too. Asymmetric encryptions are more interesting because they have a higher level of security, however due to the low computational power and poor memory capacity of the wireless sensor nodes, the use of conventional asymmetric RSA public key are impracticable. Hence, we have a challenge in the field of asymmetric encryption, where there are already a few solutions that is proving viable in sensor nodes. Therefore, the main objective is to integrate mechanisms of asymmetric cryptography to distribute keys to the security ETEWSN-Sec architecture, and so develop a full framework for RSSFs. (AU)