SecSens - Security Architecture for Wireless Sensor Networks

In recent years, the potential range of applications for sensor networks is expanding. Their use has been considered for safety critical areas such as: hospitals or power plants. The security comes more to the fore. This paper presents SecSens, an architecture that provides basic security components for wireless sensor networks. Since robust and strong security features require powerful nodes, SecSens uses a heterogeneous sensor network. In addition to a large number of simple (cheap) sensor nodes providing the actual sensor tasks, there are a few powerful nodes (cluster nodes) that implement the required security features. The basic component of SecSens offers authenticated broadcasts to allow recipients to authenticate the sender of a message. To protect the sensor network against routing attacks, SecSens includes a probabilistic multi-path routing protocol, which supports the key management and the authenticated broadcasts. SecSens also provides functions to detect forged sensor data by verifying data reports en-route. SecSens is successfully evaluated in a real test environment with two different kinds of sensor boards.