Efficient Access Control for Wireless Sensor Data

Although very developed in many sectors (databases, filesystems), access control schemes are still somewhat elusive when it comes to wireless sensor networks. However, it is clear that many WSN systems—such as healthcare and automotive ones—need a controlled access to data that sensor nodes produce, given its high sensitivity. Enforcing access control in wireless sensor networks is a particularly difficult task due to the limited computational capacity of wireless sensor nodes. In this paper we present a full-fledged access control scheme for wireless sensor data. We enforce access control through data encryption, thus embedding access control in sensor data units. We also propose a lightweight key generation mechanism, based on cryptographic hash functions, that allows for hierarchical key derivation. The suggested protocol only relies on simple operations, does not require interactions between nodes and data consumers and has minimal storage requirements.

Piervito ScagliosoEmail:

---

Alessandro Sorniotti   has a double MSc degree from Politecnico di Torino (Turin, Italy) in Computer Science and from EURECOM in Networking. He also obtained a Research Master diploma (DOA) in Networking and Distributed Systems from Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis (UNSA, Nice, France). Alessandro has won a scholarship (bourse CIFRE) and he is a PhD candidate at ENST, working as a Research Associate at SAP Labs France. His current research topic is the study of protocols for Secret Exchange, Secret Matching and Secret Handshake. Refik Molva   is a full professor and the head of the Computer Communications Department at Institute Eurécom in Sophia Antipolis, France. His current research interests are the design and evaluation of protocols for security and privacy in self-organizing systems. He previously worked on several research projects on multicast and mobile network security, anonymity and intrusion detection. Beside security, he worked on distributed multimedia applications over high speed networks and on network interconnection. Prior to joining Eurécom, he worked in the Zurich Research Laboratory of IBM where he was one of the key designers of the KryptoKnight security system. He also worked as a consultant in security for the IBM Consulting Group. He has a PhD in Computer Science from the Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse (1986) and a BSc in Computer Science (1981) from Joseph Fourier University, Grenoble, France. Laurent Gomez   is a senior researcher at SAP Research France since 2001. He is currently involved in WASP and ATLAS projects. His research activities are focused on security and context-aware systems. Prior to joining SAP Research, Laurent Gomez worked as engineer at research projects for Ericsson. He has a strong background in security of mobile applications, with a focus on context-aware systems. Laurent holds a Engineer Degree in Computing Systems from ESSI (Ecole Superieure en Sciences Informatique), Nice France. Christophe Trefois   received his BSc degree in Communication Systems from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland in 2006. In 2008, he obtained his MSc degree in Communication Systems from EPFL. From March to August 2008, he worked as a Research Assistant at SAP Labs France in Sophia Antipolis. Christophe is currently working as an IT Consultant at Ernst & Young Luxembourg and is a member of the ISACA Lux Chapter. Annett Laube   joined SAP Research Security & Trust program in 2006. She is a senior researcher currently leading in the WASP project. Prior to joining SAP, she worked at IBM Scientific Center in Heidelberg in the areas of machine translation of natural languages and text mining. Later she worked as an IBM consultant for e-business and data warehouse. In parallel she wrote her PhD thesis about the translation of dependency structures in the transfer process from one natural language to another. She started to work for SAP in 2001 at SAP Labs Montreal/Quebec and worked as a software developer for Supply Chain Event Management. Piervito Scaglioso   received his MSc degree from Politecnico di Torino in 2006. He is currently enrolled as PhD student in the Department of Computer Science at the Politecnico di Torino. His research interests include: Policy-based system and their application to manage access control, access control for wireless sensor network and hierarchical key management scheme.