Authentication for Bulk Data Dissemination in Sensor Networks Using Symmetric Keys

Abstract

We focus on authentication of bulk data dissemination in sensor networks using symmetric keys. By bulk data, we mean that the data is large enough that sufficientRAM memory cannot be allocated to store the data (due to limited memory as well as memory requirements from other parts of the code in the sensor). Hence, the data must be stored in EEPROM. Due to cost of write to EEPROM, this data must be verified before storage. We consider three scenarios: multihop coarse-grained pipelining, multihop fine-grained pipelining, and single hop. In the second and third scenarios, we show that the time to transmit 3-4 KB of data is less than (or, close to) sending even a single packet using public keys. For the first scenario, we argue that the use of symmetric keys would marginally improve the performance. For this scenario, we also propose additional techniques to reduce the cost of secure data dissemination by more than 70%.

Publication
In Proceedings of the Workshop on Reliability, Availability, and Security (WRAS), part of the Ninth International Symposium on Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems (SSS),
Mahesh Arumugam
Mahesh Arumugam

Mahesh Arumugam is a software engineer passionate about designing, programming, and deploying systems. Currently, I work in data security and analytics domain.