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Juliano F. Kazienko 1 and Paulo R. S. Silva Filho 2 and Igor M. Moraes 2 and Celio V. N. Albuquerque 2
Academic Editor:George P. Efthymoglou
1, Computing Department, Federal University of Pampa, 97546-550 Alegrete, RS, Brazil
2, Computing Institute, Fluminense Federal University, 24210-240 Niteroi, RJ, Brazil
Received 10 October 2014; Accepted 24 March 2015; 26 May 2015
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
1. Introduction
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are a particular case of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Sensor networks are composed of tiny nodes that collect data from the environment in which they are deployed, sending data through multiple hops toward sink nodes. These networks are applied with several purposes from weather forecasting to assisted living, contributing to the pervasive computing [1, 2].
Key management in WSNs certainly drives many issues. Indeed, it is frequently claimed that standard security mechanisms are prohibitive in WSNs because they demand extensive use of scarce resources, such as processing power, battery capacity, limited memory, and low bandwidth. However, since sensors are typically unattended, it is a challenge to protect sensitive data stored in sensors, as well as cryptographic keys. Key storage is a challenging issue in sensor networks which still demands suitable solutions [3-5].
In a previous work, we introduced SENSORLock [6]. It is a mechanism that assures secure key storage in sensors. In that work, its architecture is proposed and a first study case is presented where SENSORLock is applied. Besides, the evaluation was carried out so as to (i) show mathematically that the whole system and its keys are protected even if sensors are tampered with and (ii) determine the mechanism processing overhead using small-scale experiments. However, that work does not demonstrate the feasibility of using SENSORLock in different key distribution architectures and large-scale WSNs.
The main contribution of this work is to extend the application and supply a large-scale evaluation of SENSORLock to three distinct key distribution architectures: TinySec [7], SPINS [8], and network coding distribution (NCD) [9]. In this sense, we analyze SENSORLock through simulations using the TinyOS platform considering large-scale networks with 49, 100, 144, 225, and...