On the Security of Intra-Car Wireless Sensor Networks

Due to the increasing oil prices, reducing the weight of future cars will be important. One way to do this is by replacing wired sensors and their cables with wireless sensors. This could reduce the weight of cars, thus improving fuel efficiency. The replacement is anticipated to reduce the weight of an average passenger vehicle by up to 50 kg. However, such a replacement raises security concerns due to the intrinsic vulnerability of wireless technologies. In addressing security problems for intra-car wireless sensor networks, existing methods, focusing on energy efficiency and providing a low security level, are unfortunately not applicable. Our research focuses on providing a real-time and a high security solution. In this paper, we make four main contributions. First, we propose a systematic methodology to select security algorithms for real-time wireless sensor networks. Second, we determine the most effective combination with respect to the execution time and the security level by using our methodology. Third, the reported results are shown to be directly applicable to off-the-shelf sensor products and real-time wireless sensor networks, since we evaluated the performance on a real sensor platform and the real-time requirements for a car are much more stringent than other real-time systems. Finally, we suggest a mathematical methodology to increase the security level which imposes a burden only to adversaries, not to sensors.