Abstract
Wireless sensor networks have several useful applications in commercial and defense settings, as well as user-centric personal area networks. To establish secure (point-to-point and/or broadcast) communication channels among the nodes of a wireless sensor network is a fundamental security task. To this end, a plethora of so-called key pre-distribution schemes have been proposed in the past, e.g., [25][9][19][8][5]. All these schemes, however, rely on shared secret(s), which are assumed to be pre-loaded onto the sensor nodes, e.g., during the manufacturing process.
In this paper, we consider the problem of user-assisted secure initialization of sensor network necessary to bootstrap key pre-distribution. This is a challenging problem due to the level of user burden involved in initializing multiple (often large number of) sensor nodes and lack of input and output user-interfaces on sensor motes. We propose a novel method for secure sensor node initialization based on a visual out-of-band channel that utilizes minimal output interface in the form of LED(s) already available on most off-the-shelf sensor motes. The proposed method requires only a little extra cost, is efficient and reasonably scalable. Moreover, based on a usability study that we conducted, the method turns out to be quite user-friendly and easy to administer by everyday computer users.
Access provided by Autonomous University of Puebla. Download to read the full chapter text
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Mica2 specifications, http://www.xbow.com/Products/Product_pdf_files/Wireless_pdf/MICA2_Datasheet.pdf .
Balfanz, D., Smetters, D., Stewart, P., Wong, H.C.: Talking to strangers: Authentication in ad-hoc wireless networks. In: Network & Distributed System Security (NDSS) (2002)
Canetti, R., Krawczyk, H.: Analysis of key-exchange protocols and their use for building secure channels. In: Pfitzmann, B. (ed.) EUROCRYPT 2001. LNCS, vol. 2045, p. 453. Springer, Heidelberg (2001)
Castelluccia, C., Mutaf, P.: Shake them up!: a movement-based pairing protocol for cpu-constrained devices. In: International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys) (2005)
Chan, H., Perrig, A., Song, D.X.: Random key predistribution schemes for sensor networks. IEEE Security & Privacy (2003)
Cynthia, K., Luk, M., Negi, R., Perrig, A.: Message-in-a-bottle: User-friendly and secure key deployment for sensor nodes. In: ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys) (2007)
Du, W., Deng, J., Han, Y., Chen, S., Varshney, P.: A key management scheme for wireless sensor networks using deployment knowledge. In: IEEE INFOCOM 2004 (March 2004)
Du, W., Deng, J., Han, Y.S., Varshney, P.K.: A pairwise key pre-distribution scheme for wireless sensor networks. In: ACM Computer and Communications Security, CCS (2003)
Eschenauer, L., Gligor, V.D.: A key-management scheme for distributed sensor networks. In: ACM Computer and Communications Security (CCS) (2002)
Faulkner, L.: Beyond the five-user assumption: Benefits of increased sample sizes in usability testing. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers 35(3), 379–383 (2003)
Giorgetti, G., Manes, G., Lewis, J.H., Mastroianni, S.T., Gupta, S.K.S.: The personal sensor network: a user-centric monitoring solution. In: BodyNets 2007: Proceedings of the ICST 2nd international conference on Body area networks (2007)
Goodrich, M.T., Sirivianos, M., Solis, J., Tsudik, G., Uzun, E.: Loud and Clear: Human-Verifiable Authentication Based on Audio. In: International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS) (2006)
Holmquist, L.E., Mattern, F., Schiele, B., Alahuhta, P., Beigl, M., Gellersen, H.-W.: Smart-Its Friends: A Technique for Users to Easily Establish Connections between Smart Artefacts. In: Abowd, G.D., Brumitt, B., Shafer, S. (eds.) UbiComp 2001. LNCS, vol. 2201, p. 116. Springer, Heidelberg (2001)
Hu, F., Sharma, N.: Security considerations in ad hoc sensor networks. Ad Hoc Networks 3 (2005)
Karlof, C., Sastry, N., Wagner, D.: Tinysec: a link layer security architecture for wireless sensor networks. In: ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys) (2004)
Laur, S., Asokan, N., Nyberg, K.: Efficient mutual data authentication based on short authenticated strings. In: Pointcheval, D., Mu, Y., Chen, K. (eds.) CANS 2006. LNCS, vol. 4301, pp. 90–107. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Lester, J., Hannaford, B., Borriello, G.: Are You with Me? - Using Accelerometers to Determine If Two Devices Are Carried by the Same Person. In: International Conference on Pervasive Computing ( Pervasive) (2004)
Liu, A., Ning, P.: Tinyecc: A configurable library for elliptic curve cryptography in wireless sensor networks. In: Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN) (2008)
Liu, D., Ning, P.: Establishing pairwise keys in distributed sensor networks. In: ACM Computer and Communications Security (CCS) (2003)
Malan, D.J., Welsh, M., Smith, M.D.: A public-key infrastructure for key distribution in tinyos based on elliptic curve cryptography. In: IEEE Communications Society Conference on Sensor, Mesh and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks (SECON) (2004)
McCune, J.M., Perrig, A., Reiter, M.K.: Seeing-is-believing: Using camera phones for human-verifiable authentication. IEEE Security & Privacy (2005)
Milenkovic, A., Otto, C., Jovanov, E.: Wireless sensor networks for personal health monitoring: Issues and an implementation. Computer Communications 29(13-14), 2521–2533 (2006)
Pasini, S., Vaudenay, S.: SAS-based authenticated key agreement. In: Yung, M., Dodis, Y., Kiayias, A., Malkin, T.G. (eds.) PKC 2006. LNCS, vol. 3958, pp. 395–409. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Perrig, A., Stankovic, J., Wagner, D.: Security in wireless sensor networks. Communications of the ACM 47, 53–57 (2004)
Perrig, A., Szewczyk, R., Wen, V., Culler, D.E., Tygar, J.D.: Spins: security protocols for sensor netowrks. In: ACM Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MOBICOM) (2001)
Prasad, R., Saxena, N.: Efficient device pairing using human-comparable audiovisual patterns. In: Bellovin, S.M., Gennaro, R., Keromytis, A.D., Yung, M. (eds.) ACNS 2008. LNCS, vol. 5037, pp. 328–345. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Rasmussen, K.B., Capkun, S.: Implications of radio fingerprinting on the security of sensor networks. In: International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks (SecureComm) (2007)
Rowley, H.A., Baluja, S., Kanade, T.: Neural network-based face detection. In: Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) (1998)
Saxena, N., Ekberg, J.-E., Kostiainen, K., Asokan, N.: Secure device pairing based on a visual channel. IEEE Security & Privacy, short paper (2006)
Saxena, N., Uddin, B.: Automated device pairing for asymmetric pairing scenarios. In: Chen, L., Ryan, M.D., Wang, G. (eds.) ICICS 2008. LNCS, vol. 5308, pp. 311–327. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Schneiderman, H., Kanade, T.: A statistical method for 3d object detection applied to faces and cars. In: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (June 2000)
Seshadri, A., Perrig, A., van Doorn, L., Khosla, P.K.: Swatt: Software-based attestation for embedded devices. IEEE Security & Privacy (2004)
Soriente, C., Tsudik, G., Uzun, E.: BEDA: Button-Enabled Device Association. In: International Workshop on Security for Spontaneous Interaction (IWSSI) (2007)
Soriente, C., Tsudik, G., Uzun, E.: HAPADEP: Human-assisted pure audio device pairing. In: Wu, T.-C., Lei, C.-L., Rijmen, V., Lee, D.-T. (eds.) ISC 2008. LNCS, vol. 5222, pp. 385–400. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Stajano, F., Anderson, R.J.: The resurrecting duckling: Security issues for ad-hoc wireless networks. In: Security Protocols Workshop (1999)
Tatbul, N., Buller, M., Hoyt, R., Mullen, S., Zdonik, S.: Confidence-based data management for personal area sensor networks. In: DMSN 2004:1st international workshop on Data management for sensor networks. ACM, New York (2004)
Uzun, E., Karvonen, K., Asokan, N.: Usability analysis of secure pairing methods. In: Dietrich, S., Dhamija, R. (eds.) FC 2007 and USEC 2007. LNCS, vol. 4886, pp. 307–324. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Vaudenay, S.: Secure communications over insecure channels based on short authenticated strings. In: Shoup, V. (ed.) CRYPTO 2005. LNCS, vol. 3621, pp. 309–326. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Viola, P., Jones, M.: Rapid object detection using a boosted cascade of simple features. In: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (2001)
Weszka, J.: A survey of threshold selection techniques. Computer Graphics and Image Processing 7 (1978)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Saxena, N., Uddin, M.B. (2009). Blink ’Em All: Scalable, User-Friendly and Secure Initialization of Wireless Sensor Nodes. In: Garay, J.A., Miyaji, A., Otsuka, A. (eds) Cryptology and Network Security. CANS 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5888. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10433-6_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10433-6_11
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-10432-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-10433-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)