Informatics Publishing Limited

Nour El Deen M. Khalifa ¹, Mohamed Hamed N. Taha ¹, Hesham N. Elmahdy ¹, Imane A. Saroit ¹

Affiliations
1 Information Technology Department, Cairo University, Cairo, EG

Abstract

Wireless Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have become an important component in our daily lives. In near future, it will dominate the technology industry around the world. WSNs gain its importance due to the variety of vital applications it can participate in such as military, health care, agriculture, surveillance and monitoring natural phenomena applications. WSNs consist of small devices with limited energy and storage capabilities, called sensor nodes. The sensor nodes collect data from physical or environmental phenomena. They cooperatively pass the sensed data through the network to a certain location or sink node where the data can be collected and analyzed. Due to the unprotected nature of wireless communication channels and untrusted transmission medium of WSNs, it becomes vulnerable to many types of security attacks. The attackers ultimately seek to eavesdrop, steal confidential data, injecting false data or even jamming the whole network, so securing these networks becomes a must. In this paper, a proposed security schema for WSNs will be introduced. The proposed security schema will be appropriate for real time multimedia streaming. It will construct its security features within the application and transport layer as the information that the attackers seek ultimately exist within these layers. The proposed security schema consists of two security levels; the first level is encrypting the packet data using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) while the second level is generating Message Authentication Code (MAC) using Cipher-based Message Authentication Code (CMAC). Both levels achieved the principles of WSNs security and they are (authentication, confidentiality, data integrity and availability). Performance comparisons between the proposed security schema and other security frameworks are presented. Finally, all the presented work in this research was developed and implemented using Network Simulator-2 (NS-2). According to our literature reviews, this research is one of the first researches that use NS-2 as a security simulator. As NS-2 does not support any security features before.

Keywords

Wireless Sensor Networks, AES, CMAC, Security Simulator, NS-2.

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