Robust security in large-scale wireless actuator and sensor networks: a low energy two-level implementation

Our work aims to address some challenging security issues in an important information infrastructure - large-scale and low-energy wireless actuator and sensor networks (WASN). Instead of purely focusing on security research itself as in most of the current literature, we argue that WASNs have specific network constraints and data transmission requirements compared to general ad hoc networks and other wireless/wired networks. We propose to seamlessly integrate WASN security with a promising routing architecture that proves to be scalable and energy-efficient. To protect from active attacks in mobile sensor networks, we propose two-level re-keying/re-routing schemes that can not only adapt to a dynamic network topology but also securely update keys for each data transmission session. Moreover, due to the importance of secure in-networking processing such as data aggregation in WASNs, we define a multiple-key management scheme closely related to the proposed tree-ripple-zone (TRZ) routing architecture.