MoteSec-Aware: A Practical Secure Mechanism for Wireless Sensor Networks

Ensuring the security of communication and access control in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is of paramount importance. In this paper, we present a security mechanism, MoteSec-Aware, built on the network layer for WSNs with focus on secure network protocol and data access control. In the secure network protocol of MoteSec-Aware, a Virtual Counter Manager (VCM) with a synchronized incremental counter is presented to detect the replay and jamming attacks based on the symmetric key cryptography using AES in OCB mode. For access control, we investigate the Key-Lock Matching (KLM) method to prevent unauthorized access. We implement MoteSec-Aware for the TelosB prototype sensor platform running TinyOS 1.1.15, and conduct field experiments and TOSSIM-based simulations to evaluate the performance of MoteSec-Aware. The results demonstrate that MoteSec-Aware consumes much less energy, yet achieves higher security than several state-of-the-art methods.