TC-BAC: A trust and centrality degree based access control model in wireless sensor networks

Access control is one of the major security concerns for wireless sensor networks. However, applying conventional access control models that rely on the central Certificate Authority and sophisticated cryptographic algorithms to wireless sensor networks poses new challenges as wireless sensor networks are highly distributed and resource-constrained. In this paper, a distributed and fine-grained access control model based on the trust and centrality degree is proposed (TC-BAC). Our design uses the combination of trust and risk to grant access control. To meet the security requirements of an access control system with the absence of Certificate Authority, a distributed trust mechanism is developed to allow access of a trusted node to a network. Then, centrality degree is used to assess the risk factor of a node and award the access, which can reduce the risk ratio of the access control scheme and provide a certain protection level. Finally, our design also takes multi-domain access control into account and solves this problem by utilizing a mapping mechanism and group access policies. We show with simulation that TC-BAC can achieve both the intended level of security and high efficiency suitable for wireless sensor networks.