Publications

Version: 1.0 Approved

LDO-ID 2013-12-05-01

Title A regulation-based Security evaluation method for Wireless Data Link

Abstract

"This article reports a novel approach to the analysis of wireless sensor network security, based on regulations usually applied in commercial wireless communication. We apply this approach to well known Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) protocols that implement security issues. The article starts with an analysis and a classification of attacks, countermeasures and available protocols to present the current state on secure communication stacks for embedded systems. Wireless sensor networks present peculiar characteristics since the application regards, in general, low-energy and battery powered embedded devices, where the main goal is to minimize computational needs and resources used. As a consequence, overhead due to security functions must be minimized in order to reduce their impact on the limited system resources. Particular attention is pointed toward standards and regulations for wireless embedded devices in both the civil and military market. These will be used as a base to produce a correspondence table between threats and countermeasures required by security and applicable to those market segments.  Afterwards, starting from a list of known WSN attacks, we used the previous table to match WSN attacks against required countermeasures. This is the first such analysis of security for WSN.
This work allowed us to finally produce a precise evaluation and classification of existing WSN protocols from the point of view of security. The results show that current protocols do not present a complete coverage of security issues.  Even if this conclusion is a known fact for many WSN protocols, to the best of our knowledge this is the first time a complete methodology has been proposed to base this assertion. Moreover, using this methodology, we are able to precisely identify exposed threats for each WSN protocol under analysis. The proposed methodology will be used as a starting point for the design of a new WSN protocol which overcomes the security limits of present ones
"

Authors Malavenda Claudio Santo, Menichelli Francesco, Olivieri Mauro

Type Paper for Specialistic Magazine

Media Journal of Computer Networks and Communications, Volume 2014 (Hindawi)

Web site

Anno 2013