• ETRI Journal
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• v.33 no.5
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• pp.791-801
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• 2011

Security in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is an upcoming research field which is quite different from traditional network security mechanisms. Many applications are dependent on the secure operation of a WSN, and have serious effects if the network is disrupted. Therefore, it is necessary to protect communication between sensor nodes. Key management plays an essential role in achieving security in WSNs. To achieve security, various key predistribution schemes have been proposed in the literature. A secure key management technique in WSN is a real challenging task. In this paper, a novel approach to the above problem by making use of elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is presented. In the proposed scheme, a seed key, which is a distinct point in an elliptic curve, is assigned to each sensor node prior to its deployment. The private key ring for each sensor node is generated using the point doubling mathematical operation over the seed key. When two nodes share a common private key, then a link is established between these two nodes. By suitably choosing the value of the prime field and key ring size, the probability of two nodes sharing the same private key could be increased. The performance is evaluated in terms of connectivity and resilience against node capture. The results show that the performance is better for the proposed scheme with ECC compared to the other basic schemes.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.165-169
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• 2009

In this short paper, we revisit the random key predistribution methods for wireless sensor networks with regard to their intrinsic phase called the path-key establishment. First we show that the path-key establishment is less practical than expected and may degrade the performance of key establishment significantly. We then propose a novel path-key establishment method for those schemes and analyze its advantageous performance improvement.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2010.05a
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• pp.646-648
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• 2010

A Sensor Node in Wireless Sensor Network has very limited resources such as processing capability, memory capacity, battery power, and communication capability. When the communication between any two sensor nodes are required to be secured, the symmetric key cryptography technique is used for its advantage over public key cryptography in terms of requirement of less resources. Keys are pre-distributed to each sensor node from a set of keys called key pool before deployment of sensors nodes. Combinatorial design helps in a great way to determine the way keys are drawn from the key pool for distributing to individual sensor nodes. We study various deterministic key predistribution techniques that are based on combinatorial design.

• Proceedings of the Korea Institutes of Information Security and Cryptology Conference
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• 2006.06a
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• pp.591-594
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• 2006

무선 센서 네트워크에서는 센서 노드의 제약으로 인해 공개키 알고리즘을 쓰기에는 적합하지 않다. 비밀키 방식을 사용할 경우 가장 문제가 되는 부분은 키 분배 문제이다. 한 가지 방법은 센서 노드들이 배치되기 전에 미리 센서 노드들에 키를 심어 놓음으로써 해결할 수 있다. 본 논문은 키 체인을 이용해 이러한 방식을 개선하여 더욱 향상된 보안성을 제공하는 프로토콜을 제시한다.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.18 no.6B
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• pp.233-248
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• 2008

Advances in electronics and wireless communication technologies have enabled the development of large-scale wireless sensor networks (WSNs). There are numerous applications for wireless sensor networks, and security is vital for many of them. However, WSNs suffer from many constraints, including low computation capability, small memory, limited energy resources, susceptibility to physical capture, and the lack of infrastructure, all of which impose unique security challenges and make innovative approaches desirable. In this paper, we present a survey on security issues in wireless sensor networks. We address several network models for security protocols in WSNs, and explore the state of the art in research on the key distribution and management schemes, typical attacks and corresponding countermeasures, entity and message authentication protocols, security data aggregation, and privacy. In addition, we discuss some directions of future work.

• Journal of Communications and Networks
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• v.11 no.6
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• pp.599-606
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• 2009

For many mission-critical related wireless sensor network applications such as military and homeland security, user's access restriction is necessary to be enforced by access control mechanisms for different access rights. Public key-based access control schemes are more attractive than symmetric-key based approaches due to high scalability, low memory requirement, easy key-addition/revocation for a new node, and no key predistribution requirement. Although Wang et al. recently introduced a promising access control scheme based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), it is still burdensome for sensors and has several security limitations (it does not provide mutual authentication and is strictly vulnerable to denial-of-service (DoS) attacks). This paper presents an energy-efficient access control scheme based on ECC to overcome these problems and more importantly to provide dominant energy-efficiency. Through analysis and simulation based evaluations, we show that the proposed scheme overcomes the security problems and has far better energy-efficiency compared to current scheme proposed byWang et al.