Syed Muhammad Khaliq-ur-Rahman Raazi

A Survey on Key Management Strategies for Different Applications of Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) have proved to be useful in applications that involve monitoring of real-time data. There is a wide variety of monitoring applications that can employ Wireless Sensor Network. Characteristics of a WSN, such as topology and scale, depend upon the application, for which it is employed. Security requirements in WSN vary according to the application dependent network characteristics and the characteristics of an application itself. Key management is the most important aspect of security as some other security modules depend on it. We discuss application dependent variations in WSN, corresponding changes in the security requirements of WSN and the applicability of existing key management solutions in each scenario.

BARI: A Distributed Key Management Approach for Wireless Body Area Networks

In recent years, use of sensors to measure the biometrics and movements of human body have resulted in the design of wireless body area networks (WBAN). Although WBANs consist of resource constrained sensing devices just like other wireless sensor networks (WSN), they differ from WSNs in topology, scale and security requirements. Due to these differences, key management schemes designed for WSNs prove inefficient and unnecessarily complex when applied to WBANs. Considering key management issue, WBANs are also different from WPANs because WBANs can use random biometric measurements as keys. We highlight the differences between WSN and WBAN and propose an efficient key management scheme, which makes use of biometrics and is specifically designed for WBANs domain.

MUQAMI: A Locally Distributed Key Management Scheme for Clustered Sensor Networks

In many of the sensor network applications like natural habitat monitoring and international border monitoring, sensor networks are deployed in areas, where there is a high possibility of node capture and network level attacks. Specifically in such applications, the sensor nodes are severely limited in resources. We propose MUQAMI, a locally distributed key management scheme for resilience against the node capture in wireless sensor networks. Our scheme is efficient both in case of keying, re-keying and node compromise. Beauty of our scheme is that it requires minimal message transmission outside the cluster. We base our Scheme on Exclusion Basis System (EBS).

Activity-based Security Scheme for Ubiquitous Environments

Bardram introduced a new concept of activity-based computing as a way of thinking about supporting human activities in ubiquitous environments. In such environments where users are using a multitude of heterogeneous computing devices, the need for supporting users at the activity level becomes essential. However, without considering basic security issues, it could be rife with vulnerabilities. Security services, like authentication and access control, have to not only guarantee security, privacy, and confidentiality for ubiquitous computing resources, but also support user activities equipped with various devices. In this paper, we present an activity-based security scheme. The proposed scheme aims to enhance security services on mobile devices and facilitate user activities. We also integrate off-the-shell security services like MD5, TEA, Diffie-Hellman key agreement protocol so that it makes the scheme more robust and practically usable. The implementation and sample scenario have shown the requirement satisfactory of the scheme.

Activity-Oriented Access Control for Ubiquitous Environments

Recent research on ubiquitous computing has introduced a new concept of activity-based computing as a way of thinking about supporting human activities in ubiquitous computing environment. Existing access control approaches such as RBAC, became inappropriate to support this concept because they do not consider human activities. In this paper, we propose Activity-Oriented Access Control (AOAC) model, aiming to support users activity in ubiquitous environments. We have designed and implemented our initial AOAC system. We also built up a simple scenario in order to illustrate how it supports user activities. The results have shown that AOAC meets our objectives. Also, AOAC it takes approximately 0.26 second to give a response which proves that AOAC is suitable to work in real-time environments.

A Novel Architecture for Efficient Key Management in Humanware Applications

In humanware applications, resource constrained sensor devices are tactically placed on human body to form Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN). Then the WBAN is used for monitoring biometrics and movements of human body. Keeping in mind the resource constrained devices, WBANs are treated just like wireless sensor networks when considering a solution for key management. However, WBANs differ from traditional wireless sensor networks in scale, topology and security requirements. Also, the WBANs can also use random values from biometric measurements for the generation of keys. These differences render the key management schemes of WSNs inefficient and overly complex for WBANs scenario. Therefore, we propose a key management scheme that is efficient and fulfills the security requirements of WBAN.

An efficient re-keying scheme for cluster based wireless sensor networks

Due to vast application of WSN (Wireless Sensor Networks) in mission critical military operations, securing WSN has received lot of attention from the research community. WSN when deployed in hostile environment, they are prone to various kinds of attacks one of which is node capture which might reveal important sensor information being transferred to the captured node. Thus dynamic key management schemes employ re-keying mechanism to change the group key used by the sensor nodes for communication. Constrained resources such as energy, memory and computational capabilities of sensor nodes requires a re-keying scheme efficient in design to minimize overhead while maintaining secure communications over lifespan of the network. In this paper we present an efficient re-keying scheme for cluster based WSN which requires minimal communication with the base station and O(1) computation at the sensor node to calculate the new group key.