Research On Security-Enhanced IEEE 802.15.4 Protocol

Wireless sensor networks are special Ad hoc networks. Wireless sensor networks have the characteristics such as rapid deployment, fault-tolerance and self-organization. The above described features ensure a wide range of applications for sensor networks such as military, environment, health, industry control and so on. Thanks to recent advances in wireless communication, wireless sensor networks become a kind of self-organization wireless networks which taking the data as the center, the network topology is dynamic, wireless sensor networks are consisted of a large number of communication nodes applied in a wide area. Due to the limitation of sensor nodes' computation capability, power energy, communications capability and storage space, and usually deployed in harsh, unattended or even hostile environment, security communication in sensor networks becomes extremely important. In security communication of sensor networks, the confidentiality and integrity of information are critically important. This makes key management and authentication information in sensor networks security research become important issues. Standards IEEE 802.15.4 is the wireless communication standard for low-rate wireless personal area networks. With the characteristics of low rate, low cost, low power and high quality, IEEE 802.15.4 standard is considered to be the ideal technology to implement wireless sensor networks and wireless personal area networks.In this thesis, at first the main characters and security demands of wireless sensor networks were introduced, the security flaws which existed in IEEE 802.15.4 protocol were found. And then a new security-enhanced IEEE 802.15.4 protocol based on ECDSA digital signature mechanism for wireless sensor networks was presented. Compared with the existed protocol, the security of SE-IEEE802.15.4 protocol was enhanced with smaller key than RSA. Then the performance of SE-IEEE 802.15.4 protocol was evaluated with simulator NS2 which was extended. At last, the SE-IEEE 802.15.4 protocol was verified by the analytical tool AVISPA, and the results indicated that the security-enhanced IEEE 802.15.4 protocol was safe.The main research and innovation of this dissertation are as follows: 1. Public-key cryptography ECC was chosen to apply in SE-IEEE 802.15.4, compared with the other cryptography, whose advantages include small size of key, faster speed of computation.2. Some security flaws in IEEE 802.15.4 protocol were found, and then a new security-enhanced IEEE 802.15.4 protocol based on ECDSA digital signature mechanism for wireless sensor networks was presented. SE-IEEE 802.15.4 protocol provided such security services as data integrity, source authentication, non-repudiation and anti-replay.3. SE-IEEE 802.15.4 protocol was simulated under the simulator platform NS2 after which SE-IEEE 802.15.4 protocol was added into NS2 family to extend NS2 simulation platform.4. The security of SE-IEEE 802.15.4 protocol was verified formally by the analytical tool AVISPA, whose protocol models are written in the High Level Protocol Specification Language or HLPSL for short.