A Secure Architecture for Re-Taskable Sensing Systems

Sensor Networks are considered a high-innovation potential branch in the field of network computing and are widely used in several application domains thanks to their cost effectiveness, flexibility and ease of deployment. They are well suited to a multitude of monitoring and surveillance applications and are often involved in mission-critical tasks, thus making security a primary concern. Many architectures and protocols have been proposed to address this issue, mainly based on cryptographic operations, but it still represents an open research area: in fact, in order to be effective, such techniques often require complex computations and a large amount of dedicated resources, which are not available on sensor platforms according to the existing technology. Nevertheless, if considering tiered sensor networks, where tiny motes coexist with more powerful nodes, it is possible to perform some complex and efficient security schemes by exploiting the different capabilities of nodes. In this paper we present a secure architectural proposal based on the Tenet system, a tiered re-taskable sensor network architecture. Specifically, we have integrated security features into the Tenet architecture in order to implement a hybrid cryptosystem. Such a cryptosystem combines symmetric and asymmetric cryptographic schemes to benefit of the security provided by asymmetric protocols and the better performance of symmetric ones.