Design and development of an efficient and secure lightweight protocol for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Water supply and sanitation services can no longer tolerate inefficiencies of their traditional non-intelligent distribution infrastructures due to the growth of demand for their uninterrupted services in quantity and quality wise. Wireless Sensor Networks can be employed to address these issues in a'very cost effective manner. Already, Wireless Sensor Networks have been started to utilize in some countries for implementing their infrastructures of water supply and sanitation services as intelligent to provide better services and reduce financial losses. Ensuring efficient and secure data communication in Wireless Sensor Network is one ofthe major aspects in its wide range ofapplications. But, security solutions developed for traditional networks are not suitable for Wireless Sensor Networks due to its specific features. Many researches have been carried out to propose suitable efficient and secure lightweight protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks to improve their data communication. In this project, an efficient and secure lightweight protocol has been proposed for Wireless Sensor Networks. Many literatures related to various security threats, security protocols and key management schemes of Wireless Sensor Networks have been critically reviewed at the beginning of the study. Literatures regarding the pseudo random number generators and hash algorithms relevant to these security architectures have also been critiqued to analyse the suitability ofthem. In 2004, Park and Shin have proposed a lightweight protocol called Lightweight Security Protocol(LiSP). The salient feature of this protocol is the novel rekeying mechanism to tradeoff between security and resource consumption for large scale sensor networks. In 2006, Sun and coworkers have presented a lightweight security protocol with similar key management scheme ofPark and Shin, but improved security mechanism by employing a pseudo random number generator - Linear Congruential Generator(LCG). In 2015, Jain and Ojha have identified that Park-Miller pseudo random number generator is better than Linear Congruential Generator for the lightweight security protocol. Further, in 2015, Ojha and Jain analysed some other pseudo random generators to evaluate the performances of the lightweight security protocol and concluded that Park-Miller pseudo random number generator is the most suitable one. But, these studies didn’t consider Park-Miller’s latest recommendation, or v other variations of the pseudo random number generators. Pseudo random number generators play vital role in the security and efficiency of the lightweight protocols. Moreover, It has been identified that Secure Hash Algorithm-l(SHA-l) employed in this protocol has similar effect as pseudo random number generator in the security and efficiency ofthe protocol. Therefore, the performance of the lightweight protocol can be enhanced without compromising its security features, by utilizing more appropriate pseudo random number generator and hash function in its architecture. So, the latter part of the project, the secure lightweight protocols having different pseudo random number generators and secure hash algorithms have been designed and implemented to evaluate their suitability for proposing an efficient and secure lightweight protocol. Implementations have been modeled and evaluated in MATLAB software which had been recommended and utilized in many previous literatures for this purpose. Times taken for the computations have been analysed with pseudo random number generators and secure hash algorithms employed with their specific features. The pseudo random number generator, LCG Sheffield, has been identified as a most suitable pseudo random number generator for the lightweight protocol. Secure Hash Algorithm -1 proposed in the previous studies has been identified as a most efficient hash function for the lightweight protocol. This study proposes a secure lightweight protocol which is experimentally shown as, in average, 5.7% more efficient than the secure protocol proposed in the study by Jain and Ojha in 2015.