Secure and Efficient Dealing with Node Capture Attack in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

quotWireless Sensor Networks (WSN) have found enormous applications in various newlineareas of day-to-day life such as in health-care, battle-field surveillance and disaster management. The communication amongst the sensor nodes within a WSN takes place on an unreliable wireless channel. Therefore, the nodes are vulnerable to various security attacks such as eavesdropping and message replay attack. Typically, the sensor nodes in a WSN are mostly deployed in unattended areas that render the nodes vulnerable to physical attacks. Node capture attack is one of the most precarious attacks that allows an adversary to physically capture, reprogram and redeploy a node in the network to carry out other malicious activities such as routing or cloning attacks and may badly hamper the normal functionality of the network. In this thesis, we address the node capture attack with a newlinesecure and efficient solution framework that comprises of a set of protocols for secure key establishment, detection of node capture attack and revocation of a victim of node capture attack. For secure key establishment, we worked on pairwise key establishment and key update and propose a protocol that use multiple polynomial shares based master secret and update the pair-wise key for each session using random inputs from the pair of nodes involved. We then propose selfhealing and mutual-healing enabled group key distribution protocols. First, we present a protocol using bilinear pairing and then a protocol that uses Chinese remainder newlinetheorem (CRT) based secret sharing. Detection of node capture attack is carried out using program integrity verification of suspect node by cluster heads equipped with trusted platform module (TPM). To revoke a node capture victim,we propose a node revocation and key update protocol. newline newlineWe used analytical reasoning, theorem proving technique and formal analysis with ProVerif tool to analyze the security of the proposed protocols.