Somanath Tripathy

Defense against outside attacks in wireless sensor networks

Networking unattended wireless sensors have significant impact on both military and non-military applications. Efficiency of wireless sensor network (WSN) depends on the correctness of the information those have been collected. At the same time, security is most important to prevent outsiders (i.e. illegitimate party) from retrieving the correct information. This paper proposes a user authentication mechanism to countermeasure the outside attacks. The salient feature of the proposed technique is that it establishes threshold number of session keys simultaneously between the user and individual sensor nodes during a single authentication process without using the public key cryptography. The proposed scheme therefore, reduces the computational complexity on one hand and enhances the security aspects on the other.

WRSR: wormhole-resistant secure routing for wireless mesh networks

Wormhole attack is one of the most severe security threats in wireless mesh network that can disrupt majority of routing communications, when strategically placed. At the same time, most of the existing wormhole defence mechanisms are not secure against wormhole attacks that are launched in participation mode. In this paper, we propose WRSR, a wormhole-resistant secure routing algorithm that detects the presence of wormhole during route discovery process and quarantines it. Unlike other existing schemes that initiate wormhole detection process after observing packet loss, WRSR identifies route requests traversing a wormhole and prevents such routes from being established. WRSR uses unit disk graph model to determine the necessary and sufficient condition for identifying a wormhole-free path. The most attractive features of the WRSR include its ability to defend against all forms of wormhole (hidden and Byzantine) attacks without relying on any extra hardware like global positioning system, synchronized clocks or timing information, and computational intensive traditional cryptographic mechanisms.

Secure user-identification and key distribution scheme preserving anonymity

User-identification and key distribution with preserving anonymity is an important issue for remote access. Yang et al. proposed an efficient user identification and key distribution scheme preserving user anonymity. In this paper, we show the vulnerabilities of Yangs scheme against forgery and impersonation attacks. Further, we propose a highly secured protocol upholding the same properties.

LISA: lightweight security algorithm for wireless sensor networks

Confidentiality and authenticity are two important security services required for almost every WSN application. However, small memory, weak processor and limited battery power of the sensor nodes are the major obstacles to implement traditional security primitives in them. Owing to both, the requirement as well as the obstacles, this paper proposes a LIghtweight Security Algorithm (LISA) tailored to implement in resource restrained sensor nodes. The novelty of this scheme is that it achieves both, confidentiality and authenticity of data, without using traditional encryption algorithm.

Improved heuristics for multicast routing in wireless mesh networks

Multicast is a communication technique that allows a source to transmit data to a set of recipients in an efficient manner. Therefore, the primary objective of a multicast routing protocol would be to minimize number of transmissions to conserve bandwidth. The problem of computing multicast trees with minimal bandwidth consumption is similar to Steiner tree problem and has shown to be NP-complete. So, heuristic based algorithms are suitable to approximate such bandwidth optimal trees. This paper proposes a multicast routing protocol based on minimum number of transmission trees using an heuristic approach. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm offers better performance over existing protocols, even in the worst-case scenario when the set of multicast receivers are sparsely distributed across the network.

Securing Wireless Sensor Networks Against Spurious Injections

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are best suited for perceiving a phenomenon, which in turn forms the basis for controlling an actuator in a corrective plane. However, before the corrective action can be invoked, it is necessary to validate that the data was not injected with a malicious intent. To this end we propose CADA (cellular automata based data authentication mechanism), a lightweight protocol to authenticate data from valid nodes. Unlike its predecessors, it is designed to assume scarcity of multiple resources viz power, processing, storage, bandwidth and radio range.CADA takes advantage of the concurrent operations in cellular automata components and is therefore not only fast but also easily realizable in hardware.

Secure Multicast Routing Algorithm for Wireless Mesh Networks

Multicast is an indispensable communication technique in wireless mesh network WMN. Many applications in WMN including multicast TV, audio and video conferencing, and multiplayer social gaming use multicast transmission. On the other hand, security in multicast transmissions is crucial, without which the network services are significantly disrupted. Existing secure routing protocols that address different active attacks are still vulnerable due to subtle nature of flaws in protocol design. Moreover, existing secure routing protocols assume that adversarial nodes cannot share an out-of-band communication channel which rules out the possibility of wormhole attack. In this paper, we propose SEMRAW SEcure Multicast Routing Algorithm for Wireless mesh network that is resistant against all known active threats including wormhole attack. SEMRAW employs digital signatures to prevent a malicious node from gaining illegitimate access to the message contents. Security of SEMRAW is evaluated using the simulation paradigm approach.

Tin-Key: Effective Key-Establishment for Wireless Sensor Networks

To achieve security in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), pairwise key establishment between two sensor nodes is important. Public key cryptography based key establishment mechanisms are not suitable for WSN, due to their more energy consumption and complex hardware requirements. On the other hand, a different class of key establishment scheme that stores key or key related information are computationally efficient, but, demands huge storage space at each sensor node. Most of the existing symmetric cryptography based key establishment mechanisms use the on-line TTP server which could be a bottleneck results in denial of services attacks. This paper proposes a symmetric key cryptography based shared key establishment technique efficiently tailored towards the wireless sensor networks addressing all these issues. The proposed scheme places the TTP server off-line and requires a (constant) small storage at each sensor node. Moreover, the scheme efficiently supports for adding or deleting nodes after the initial deployment.

Robust Mutual Authentication for Low-cost RFID Systems

Secure authentication is most essential in RFID based systems to protect consumer privacy and maintain data confidentiality. In this paper, we propose a robust mutual authentication for low-cost RFID system called MAR, which does not incorporate any intensive computation such as encryption or hash operation at the tag end. The scheme is robust against various known attacks while achieving data confidentiality and maintaining forward secrecy.

Defence against Wormhole Attacks in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wormhole attack is one of the most severe security threats on wireless mesh network. Unfortunately, most of the existing wormhole defence mechanisms are not secure against wormhole attacks while launched in participation mode. In this paper, we propose a wormhole defence mechanism (WDM), which operates in conjunction with any underlying routing protocol to detect the presence of wormhole during route discovery. The mechanism is based on the unit-disk graph model which defines necessary and sufficient condition for a secure path. WDM is resistant against hidden and exposed wormhole attacks, and does not rely on any extra hardware like global positioning system, time or connectivity information.