Abedelaziz Mohaisen

Hierarchical grid-based pairwise key predistribution scheme for wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) consists of huge number of sensor nodes which are small and inexpensive with very limited resources. The public key cryptography is undesirable to be used in WSN because of the limitations of the resources. A key management and predistribution techniques are required to apply the symmetric key cryptography in such a big network. Many key predistribution techniques and approaches have been proposed, but few of them considered the real WSN assumptions. In this paper, we propose a security framework that is based on a hierarchical grid for WSN considering the proper assumptions of the communication traffic and required connectivity. We apply simple keying material distribution scheme to measure the value of our framework. Finally, we provide security analysis for possible security threats in WSN.

Cooperative public key authentication protocol in wireless sensor network

Recent measurements for Public Key Cryptography (PKC) protocols on 8-bit wireless sensor nodes showed optimistic results. It has been shown that Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is quite applicable to WSN. Still, PKC is much expensive in terms of computation and memory compared by the Symmetric Key Cryptography (SKC). In addition, in PKC, each public key needs to be authenticated before it’s used. We believe that sooner or later, PKC will be widely deployed in WSN. Therefore, we present a cooperative distributed public key authentication scheme that does not require any cryptographic overhead. In our scheme, each node is let to store a few number of hashed keys for other nodes. When a public key authentication is required, nodes who store this key help in authenticating it in a distributed and cooperative way. We consider the constrained resources of the sensor node. Additionally, we extend our scheme to fit with small range of authentication error.

On grid-based key pre-distribution: toward a better connectivity in wireless sensor network

In this paper, we revisit Grid-Based Key Pre-Distribution Scheme in Wireless Sensor Network to investigate improving the connectivity of the network and maintain both the security level and communication overhead. Both of the original work and our modification are based on using symmetric bivariate polynomials for generating cryptographic keys. In addition, their work relies on the usage of multi-dimensional grid to assign the polynomials on the sensor nodes allocated on the intersections of the grid and provide a needed connectivity. In this work we consider the simplification of the key establishment logic, the enhancement of connectivity in what we call the plat polynomial assignment. We present detailed discussion on the connectivity, resources usage, and security features that shows better results on the side of the connectivity, intermediate node discovery and security measurement. Finally, we provide a comparison between our results and other existing solutions including the revisited scheme.

Secret key revocation in sensor networks

Many challenging security-related issues have been studied in wireless sensor networks to provide a demanded quality and security for deliverable data. Yet, one of these issues which are not handled is the secret key revocation. In a semi-dynamic, resource-constrained and long-living sensor network with self organization features, traditional revocation methods are not desirable and somehow impractical. Through this paper, we discuss the rising issue of key revocation due to the predistribution and provide several techniques, structures and algorithms for several network and security conditions and requirements. In addition to the saving of the resources represented by the communication, computation and memory, we provide an extension for special-case networks in which our work can provide a higher performance.

Structures for communication-efficient public key revocation in ubiquitous sensor network

In this paper we discuss the uprising problem of public key revocation. The main problem in key revocation includes the relatively large memory and communication required to store and transmit the revoked list of keys. This problem becomes serious as the sensor network is subjected to several constraints. In this paper, we introduce several efficient representation mechanisms for representing a set of revoked identifiers of keys. We discuss several network and revocation scenarios and introduce the corresponding solution for each. To demonstrate the value of our proposed approaches, practical simulation results and several comparisons with the current used revocation mechanism are included.

Certificate issuing using proxy and threshold signatures in self-initialized ad hoc network

In ad hoc network, it is very crucial to issue certificates safely in the self-initialized scheme where the system authority exists only at the beginning of the network operation. In order to solve this problem, early studies have presented some suggestions by removing the system authority itself and using certificate chain, or by making nodes act as system authorities for issuing other nodes certificates. In this paper, using proxy and threshold signatures, we introduce a certificate issuing scheme that can solve many problems in the previously proposed solutions. We demonstrate our schemes performance through the simulation results. Also, we discuss the security value of our schemes in various aspects.