CT-ISG: Broadcast/Multicast Security in Multi-User Wireless Sensor Networks

Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester MA

Investigators

Abstract

Project Abstract Wireless sensor networks have received tremendous attention in the past few years and have been envisioned as the key enabling technology for the future ubiquitous computing environment. To successfully realize such a vision, mechanisms that allow a large number of (mobile) users, in addition to a small number of (fixed) sink nodes, to securely and efficiently access the wireless sensor networks are indispensable. This project is to develop security mechanisms to secure broadcast/multicast communications in a multi-user wireless sensor networks since broadcast/multicast is the most important communication type when a user attempts to access a wireless sensor network, either to retrieve desired information or to request some actions taken by some sensor/actuator nodes. More specifically, this project is focused on two major security tasks: broadcast/multicast authentication and encryption. The first task is on multi-user broadcast authentication, which aims to provide effective, efficient, scalable, and secure broadcast authentication mechanisms that support a large number of mobile users to broadcast to a wireless sensor network anytime from anywhere in the network. Efficient cryptographic tools will be integrated with public key operations to minimize the overall computation and communication overhead and achieve higher security strength for various application scenarios. The second task is on semantics-based dynamic multicast encryption, which aims to provide a more efficient solution to handle the group membership dynamics. The idea is based on a novel semantics-based elementary group concept and efficient multicast encryption schemes that integrate energy-efficient geographical multicast routing techniques will be devised.