Realizing Robust User Authentication in Sensor Networks

Abstract

We investigate how to organize access control to the WSN data in such a way that an unauthorized entity (the adversary) cannot make arbitrary queries to the WSN. We call this problem authenticated querying. Roughly, this means that whenever the sensor nodes process a query, they should be able to verify that the query comes from a legitimate user. Authenticated querying is especially challenging if the adversary can gain full control over some sensor nodes through physical access (node capture attack). We propose first solution to this problem and present our experiments with an implementation of the first step of this solution.