Security Module Based On Command Code For Resource Constrained Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have the power to fit the Internet with wings, however, it will not take off until the security technological hurdles have been overcome. A WSN is a wireless network composed of a large number of sensor nodes that are resources constrained regarding to their energy, size of memory, computational and communication capacities. So, it is impossible to use the existing security designs aimed for traditional networks, where network nodes are much more powerful. This project is trying to develop a new security module adapted to the WSN which are highly constrained by their resources.This dissertation covers three important aspects. The first study addresses the short keys issues. After, we implement Rijndael to use a32-bit key, we can break the encryption in18minutes by using at2.9GHz processor, in3min if we use8cores at2.9GHz. Asymmetric encryptions like RSA are also not a solution, because the keys generation process alone consumes too much resources. So, we use the code in the operating system (OS) for the keys generation. In this way we can solve in a simple and efficient way the distribution and synchronization problems of keys.The second study addresses multiple algorithms security in WSNs. In the first study, we decided to use short keys, consequently it decreases the security. Moreover, we also use the OS code to generate keys, thus if an attacker uses the same operating system as us, it can get all our keys. To address the first issue, we can use multiple encryption algorithms. Horizontally, we can separate the data in several parts and encrypt each part with different algorithms. Vertically, we can apply different algorithms to encrypt the same part of data. We also used a compression algorithm as an encryption algorithm. The second issue is addressed by a pseudo-random partitioning scheme of the code area.The third study addresses context-aware security in WSNs. We propose to use a port (OS module) to manage all the security issues:use differents algorithms (keys generation, encryption, decryption), protect data according to the data themselves (type, importance,...) to obtain a good trade off between security and complexity.