Achieving distributed user access control in sensor networks

User access control in sensor networks defines a process of granting user an access right to the stored information. It is essential for future real sensor network deployment in which sensors may provide users with different services in terms of data and resource accesses. A centralized access control mechanism requires the base station to be involved whenever a user requests to get authenticated and access the information stored in the sensor node, which is inefficient, not scalable, and is exposed to many potential attacks along long communication paths. In this paper, we propose a distributed user access control under a realistic adversary model in which sensors can be compromised and user may collude. We split the access control into local authentication conducted by a group of sensors physically close to a user, and a light remote authentication based on the endorsement of the local sensors. We implement the access control protocols on a testbed of TelosB motes. Our analysis and experimental results show that our schemes are feasible for real access control requirements.