Energy-aware adaptive security management for wireless sensor networks

We present a work in progress of an adaptive security management scheme for wireless sensor networks. The unique characteristics of these networks place great demands on their design and operation in terms of resource and security management. Resource and security adaptability achieved through self- and context-awareness will take the feasibility of the networks to a new level. The scheme has self- and context-awareness in addition to a holistic view of security services at each layer of the communication stack. It uses distributed agents and intrusion detection systems to monitor the security threats and then dynamically adapts its security level by jointly considering several dimensions. This translates into optimal security-energy under a given resource and context. The key dimensions are energy budget, computing power and memory size of nodes, location-based security threat levels, data coherence, and data lifetime. Trust management is used to test the integrity of untrusted nodes which further assist the adaptation decision.