OPTIMIZED SECURITY PROTOCOL FOR WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

Abstract

Extensive research has been conducted in the field of wireless sensor networks(WSNs). Both the academia and researchers have envisioned a broad range of applications for WSNs. Many of these applications require varying levels of security. Security is an attribute that is computational and communicational intensive. Severe lack of resources and limited capability has made providing security a challenging task in WSN. Therefore techniques need to be devised that provide security without compromising the limited resources available to WSNs. This thesis focuses on the design, implementation and analysis of an Optimized Security Protocol (OSP) that fulfills the requirements of confidentiality, authentication and integrity in WSNs. OSP fulfils requirements of high level security without compromising resources. OSP architecture is based on the further optimization of computations in the Rabbit stream cipher and reduction in communication overhead to save sensor’s life time. The proposed OSP has been implemented using power of TinyOS coupled with NesC. In order to evaluate the system, several experiments have been carried out with respect to encryption/ decryption of various data blocks. Evaluation of OSP has been done by conducting a comprehensive efficiency analysis of the proposed architecture. Furthermore, the results of execution time and memory footprint for OSP have been compared to its cryptographic counterparts. The decrease in the memory footprint and execution time proves that OSP is a very viable choice for WSNs. Since OSP provides extensive security features, operates within the optimal ranges for WSNs and outperforms existing security protocol for WSNs therefore this protocol promises to be widely accepted.