Energy efficient node-to-node authentication and communication confidentiality in wireless sensor networks

A distributed Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a collection of low-end devices with wireless message exchange capabilities. Due to the scarcity of hardware resources, the lack of network infrastructures, and the threats to security, implementing secure pair-wise communications among any pair of sensors is a challenging problem in distributed WSNs. In particular, memory and energy consumption as well as resilience to sensor physical compromise are the most stringent requirements. In this paper, we introduce a new threat model to communications confidentiality in WSNs, the smart attacker model. Under this new, more realistic model, the security features of previously proposed schemes decrease drastically. We then describe a novel pseudo-random key pre-deployment strategy ESP that combines all the following properties: (a) it supports an energy-efficient key discovery phase requiring no communications; (b) it provides node to node authentication; (c) it is highly resistant to the smart attacker.We provide both asymptotic results and extensive simulations of the schemes that are beingproposed. This work was partially funded by the WEB-MINDS project supported by the Italian MIUR under the FIRB program, and by the PRIN 2003 “Web-based Management and Representation of Spatial and Geographic Data” program from the Italian MIUR. Roberto Di Pietro is partially funded by ISTI-CNR, WNLab, Pisa, with a Post-doc grant under the IS-MANET program. Roberto Di Pietro received the Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Roma “La Sapienza”, Italy, in 2004. He received the Bs. and Ms. degree in Computer Science from the University of Pisa, Italy, in 1994. Since 1995 he has been working for the technical branch of the Italian Army and the Internal Affairs Ministry. His main research interests include: security for mobile ad hoc and wireless networks, security for distributed systems, secure multicast, applied cryptography and computer forensics. Luigi V. Mancini received the PhD degre in Computer Science from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, in 1989, and the Laurea degree in Computer Science from the University of Pisa, Italy, in 1983. From 2000, he is a full professor of Computer Science at the Dipartimento di Informatica of the University of Rome “La Sapienza”. Since 1994, he is a visiting research professor of the Center for Secure Information Systems, GMU, Virginia, USA. Currently he is the advisor of six Ph.D students. His current research interests include: computer network and information security, wireless network security, fault-tolerant distributed systems, large-scale peer-to-peer systems, and hard-real-time distributed systems. He published more than 60 scientific papers in international conferences and journals such as: ACM TISSEC, IEEE TKDE, IEEE TPDS, and IEEE TSE. He served in the program committees of several international conferences which include: ACM Conference on Computer and Communication Security, ACM Conference on Conceptual Modeling, ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technology, ACM Workshop of Security of Ad-hoc and Sensor Networks, IEEE Securecomm, IEEE Conference on Cluster Computing. He is also the program chair of the first two editions of the IEEE Workshop on Hot Topics in Peer-to-Peer Systems held in 2004 (Volendam, Holand) and in 2005 (San Diego, California). Currently, he is a member of the Scientific Board of the Italian Communication Police force, and the director of the Master degree program in Computer and Network Security of the University of Rome “La Sapienza”, Italy. Alessandro Mei received the Laurea degree in computer science from the University of Pisa, Italy, in 1994, and the PhD degree in mathematics from the University of Trento, Italy, in 1999. In 1998, he was at the Department of EE-Systems of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, as a visiting scholar for one year. After holding a postdoctoral position at the University of Trento, in 2001 he joined the Faculty of Science of the University of Rome "La Sapienza", Italy, as an assistant professor of computer science. His main research interests include security of distributed systems and networks, algorithms for parallel, distributed, and optical systems and reconfigurable computing. He was presented with the Best Paper Award of the 16th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium in 2002, the EE-Systems Outstanding Research Paper Award of the University of Southern California for 2000, and the Outstanding Paper Award of the Fifth IEEE/ACM International Conference on High Performance Computing in 1998. He is a member of the ACM and the IEEE and, from 2005, he is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Computers.