An Enhanced Group Access Control Scheme For Dynamically Managing Wireless Sensor Networks

Recently, wireless Sensor Networks(WSNs) have been paid more and more attention and are widely used in a lots of military and commercial applications. Specially, unattended sensor networks operating in hostile environments might collect data that represents a high-value target for adversaries. Access control mechanism among nodes defines a process of identifying a node and granting a node the access right to data or resources in WSNs. An adversary is assumed to use all possible means to access the data that is not authorized to him. Since nodes in WSNs are unattended most of the time and communicate each other in a multi-hop fashion, their communication is vulnerable to the adversaries. Obviously, the communication paradigm poses more challenges for access control among nodes due to small and power constrained sensor nodes.This thesis develops a scheme to manage the group access key used in the group communication for WSNs, by integrating Diffie-Hellman key agreement, symmetric encryption algorithms, message authentication code and security filtering function, such that both the safety of the group key and communications between the nodes have improved. Furthermore, we design the migration operation of nodes among different groups to reduce the computing and communication cost in the nodes’ dynamic management.After analyzing the safety of proposed scheme, we evaluate its performance in the thesis. Finally, a simulation experiment has implemented by Java programming language on Eclipse development platform in Windows 8 operating system.