A lightweight security framework for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks are a promising future of many commercial and military applications. However, these networks pose unique security challenges. While the deployment of sensor nodes in an unattended environment makes the networks vulnerable to a variety of potential attacks, the inherent power and memory limitations of sensor nodes makes conventional security solutions unfeasible. Though there has been some development in the field of sensor network security, the solutions presented thus far address only some of security problems faced. The deployment of sensor networks in many sensitive applications requires an ample solution. This paper presents a computationally lightweight security framework to provide a comprehensive security solution against the known attacks in sensor networks. The proposed framework consists of four interacting components: a secure triple-key scheme (STKS), secure routing algorithms (SRAs), a secure localization technique (SLT) and a malicious node detection mechanism. Singly, each of these components can achieve certain level of security. However, when deployed as a framework, a high degree of security is achievable. The framework takes into consideration the communication and computation limitations of sensor networks. While there is always a tradeoff between security and performance, experimental results prove that the proposed framework can achieve high degree of security with negligible overheads.