A standard compliant security framework for IEEE 802.15.4 networks

The IEEE 802.15.4 standard is widely recognized as one of the most successful enabling technologies for short range low rate wireless communications. It covers all the details related to the MAC and PHY layers of the protocol stack. In addition, it supports the possibility to protect MAC packets by using symmetric-key cryptography techniques and it offers several security options. But, at the same time, the standard relies on upper layers to orchestrate the usage of the plethora of security profiles and configuration settings it makes available, as well as to handle the creation and the exchange of encryption keys. In support of this functionality, this work describes a standard compliant security framework aimed at proposing: (i) different kind of security architectures, (ii) an efficient mechanism for initializing a secure IEEE 802.15.4 domain, and (iii) a lightweight mechanism to negotiate link keys among devices.