Abstract
Many sensor network deployments are heterogeneous: a large number of regular nodes perform sensing, while some nodes have better energy resources and/or more computational capacity. Whereas the effect of heterogeneous nodes on network reliability and lifetime has been studied [3], we here focus on exploiting heterogeneity for security. For security and privacy, the identity of nodes must be authenticated and keys have to be distributed. In our lightweight end-middle-end security framework, every node has a public/private key pair, but only resource-rich gateway nodes use public key cryptography to compute digital signatures. Since gateway nodes vouch for regular nodes, regular nodes can use symmetric cryptography until a gateway is reached. On regular nodes, this reduces energy consumption and processing delays by more than a factor of 3000. Re-encryption on the gateways is typically not the bottleneck, since gateways are often line-powered and typically more than 100 times faster than regular nodes (e.g. Stargate vs. Mica). An additional advantage of our end-middle-end architecture is that only gateways are affected by changes in user privileges.
Index
Terms
Available to subscribers and IEEE members.
References
Available to subscribers and IEEE members.
Citing Documents
Available to subscribers and IEEE members.
Cart
