Oscar Garcia-Morchon
Klaus Wehrle
ABSTRACT
Key agreement and digital certificates allow bootstrapping secure communication links and verifying identities or information. Thus, they are the cornerstone of many basic security functionalities. However, the resource-constrained nature of wireless sensor nodes limits the use of traditional solutions in wireless sensor networks. We propose a novel scheme allowing for fast, resource-friendly, and distributed key agreement and verification of information, featuring the efficiency of symmetric-key cryptography and the functionality of public-key certificates. The core idea of our system relies on the cryptographic association of identification information with polynomial shares. This concept allows the base station of a sensor network to sign node identification and configuration information such as routing addresses or access control roles. The information is signed by means of the polynomial shares distributed to nodes creating a lightweight digital certificate for each node. The proposed system operates in a fully stand-alone and distributed way, being able to perform a combined key agreement and lightweight digital certificate verification handshake within a few milliseconds with very low memory requirements.
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Digital Library
- C. Blundo, A.D. Santis, A. Herzberg, S. Kutten, U. Vaccaro and M. Yung, "Perfectly-Secure Key Distribution for Dynamic Conferences," in Proc. Conf. Advances in Cryptology (Crypto'92), 1992. Google ScholarDigital Library
- C. Cordeiro and M. Patel, "Body Area Network Stardardization: Present and Future Directions," in Proc. Of BodyNets 2007, June 2007. Google ScholarDigital Library
- D. Sanchez and H. Baldus, "A Deterministic Pairwise Key Pre-Distribution Scheme for Mobile Sensor Networks," in Proc. Of SecureComm 2005. Google ScholarDigital Library
- G. Perbellini, P. Garino, O. Garcia-Morchon, H. Baldus, and A. Willig. "ANGEL Deliverable D2.3: Complete co-simulation framework and refined models of the components of the ANGEL platform" Advanced Networked embedded platform as a Gateway to Enhance quality of Life (ANGEL) FP6 EU funded project (www.angel-ist.eu)Google Scholar
- O. Garcia-Morchon and H. Baldus, "Efficient Distributed Security for Medical Wireless Sensor Networks," in Proc. Of ISSNIP 2008. Sydney, December 2008.Google Scholar
- Q. Zhang, P. Wang, D.S. Reeves, and P. Ning, "Defending against Sybil Attacks in WSNs," in Proc. of SDCS-2005, pages 185--191, June 2005. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Brief announcement: lightweight key agreement and digital certificates for wireless sensor networks
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