A Lightweight Security Framework for Wireless Sensor
Networks
Tanveer A. Zia1 and Albert Y. Zomaya2
1Charles Sturt
University
Locked Bag 588, Boorooma St.
Wagga Wagga, NSW 2678, Australia
tzia@csu.edu.au
2The University of
Sydney
Sydney, NSW 2006
Australia
albert.zomaya@sydney.edu.au
Abstract
Wireless sensor networks are a promising future of many
commercial and military applications.
However, these networks pose unique security challenges.
While the deployment of sensor nodes in
an unattended environment makes the networks vulnerable
to a variety of potential attacks, the inherent
power and memory limitations of sensor nodes makes
conventional security solutions unfeasible.
Though there has been some development in the field of
sensor network security, the solutions presented
thus far address only some of security problems faced.
The deployment of sensor networks
in many sensitive applications requires an ample
solution. This paper presents a computationally
lightweight security framework to provide a comprehensive
security solution against the known attacks
in sensor networks. The proposed framework consists of
four interacting components: a secure
triple-key scheme (STKS), secure routing algorithms
(SRAs), a secure localization technique (SLT)
and a malicious node detection mechanism. Singly, each of
these components can achieve certain
level of security. However, when deployed as a framework,
a high degree of security is achievable.
The framework takes into consideration the communication
and computation limitations of sensor
networks. While there is always a tradeoff between
security and performance, experimental results
prove that the proposed framework can achieve high degree
of security with negligible overheads.
Keywords: Wireless
sensor networks security, Security framework, Secure key management,
Secure routing, Secure
localization, Malicious node detection
Journal of Wireless Mobile Networks,
Ubiquitous Computing, and Dependable Applications (JoWUA),
Vol. 2, No. 3, pp. 53-73, September
2011 [pdf]