Title page for ETD etd-05102005-122245

Type of Document

Dissertation

Author

Liu, Donggang ,

Author's Email Address

dliu@ncsu.edu

URN

etd-05102005-122245

Title

Security Mechanisms for Wireless Sensor Networks

Degree

PhD

Graduate Program

Computer Science

Advisory Committee

Advisor Name	Title
Peng Ning	Committee Chair
Carla D. Savage	Committee Member
Douglas S. Reeves	Committee Member
Mladen A. Vouk	Committee Member

Keywords

key management
security
broadcast authentication

Date of Defense

2005-05-05

Availability

unrestricted

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks have received a lot of attention recently due
to its wide applications in military and civilian operations. Example
applications include target tracking, scientific exploration, and data
acquisition in hazardous environments. Security becomes one of the
main concerns when there are malicious attacks against the network.
However, providing security services in such networks turns out to be
a challenging task due to the resource constraints on sensor nodes and
the node compromise attacks. These features and challenges motivate
the research on security mechanisms for wireless sensor networks.

This dissertation includes three studies on security mechanisms for
wireless sensor networks. The first study extends the capabilities of
$mu$TESLA, a broadcast authentication technique for wireless sensor
networks, so that it can cover long time period and support a large
number of sensor nodes as well as potential senders in the network.

The second study addresses how to establish pairwise keys between
sensor nodes in a wireless sensor network. A key pre-distribution
framework based on bivariate polynomial pool is developed for this
purpose. Two efficient instantiations of this framework are also
provided: a {em random subset assignment} scheme and a {em
hypercube-based} key pre-distribution scheme. To further improve the
pairwise key establishment in static sensor networks, prior deployment
knowledge, post deployment knowledge and group-based deployment
knowledge are used to facilitate key pre-distribution.

The third study investigates how to enhance the security of location
discovery in sensor networks. An attack-resistant MMSE method and a
voting-based method are developed to tolerate malicious attacks
against location discovery. Both methods can survive malicious attacks
even if the attacks bypass traditional cryptographic protections such
as authentication, as long as the benign beacon signals constitute the
majority of the ``consistent' beacon signals. In addition, a number
of techniques are proposed to detect and revoke malicious beacon nodes
that supply malicious beacon signals to sensor nodes.

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