International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks

Volume 2013 (2013), Article ID 956736, 2 pages

http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/956736

Editorial

Trust, Security, and Privacy in Next-Generation Wireless Sensor Networks

Muhammad Khurram Khan,¹ Yang Xiang,² Shi-Jinn Horng,³ and Hsiao-Hwa Chen⁴

¹Center of Excellence in Information Assurance, King Saud University, P.O. Box 92144, Riyadh 11653, Saudi Arabia

²Network Security and Computing Lab, School of Information Technology, Deakin University, 221 Burwood Highway, Burwood, VIC 3125, Australia

³Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Section 4, 43 Kee-Lung Road, Taipei 106, Taiwan

⁴Department of Engineering Science, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan 70101, Taiwan

Received 9 September 2013; Accepted 9 September 2013

Copyright © 2013 Muhammad Khurram Khan et al. 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.

Recent advances in wireless communication technologies and applications have enabled the large-scale deployment of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). These networks have applications in several important and critical areas, such as military, critical infrastructure monitoring, healthcare, environment monitoring, and manufacturing. Security and privacy are critical issues to many sensor network applications, and it is a paramount concern for the growth of WSNs. Providing security and privacy to WSNs is challenging due to the open nature of wireless communication and the limited capabilities of sensor nodes in terms of processing power, storage, bandwidth, and energy. Moreover, widespread and unrestricted deployment of WSNs makes them exposed to a number of security and privacy vulnerabilities.

This special issue is aimed at fostering the latest development in the design, implementation, and evaluation in the fields of trust, security, and privacy of WSNs. Original contributions that provide novel theories, frameworks, and solutions to challenging problems of trust, security, and privacy were solicited for this special issue. As a whole, this special issue contains a diverse collection of 17 high-quality papers authored by eminent academicians and researchers in the field.

The paper by S. Irum et al. presents a hybrid key agreement scheme for wireless body area networks (WBANs) for both intra-WBAN and inter-WBAN communications. The authors compare their proposed scheme with the existing work and show through simulations and theoretical analysis that the proposed scheme is a better choice for WBANs in terms of security, storage efficiency, and energy consumption.

The paper by M. Faisal et al. integrates a lightweight PKI that utilizes ECC and AES cryptoalgorithms with a secure data transmission service via multipath in an efficient manner, in terms of resource and power consumption. The proposed protocols enhance the security of WSN by providing mutual authentication between neighbor nodes and sending the data via multipath for redundancy.

The paper by Y. Zhang et al. presents a secret sharing-based key management (SSKM) for wireless sensor network. SSKM utilizes the advantages of hierarchical architecture and adopt two-level key management and authentication mechanism. Different from previous works, the SSKM distributes keys based on secret sharing mechanism by the clustered architecture, which not only localizes the key things but also keeps scalability.

The paper by A. Ye et al. proposes an improved positioning algorithm for RFID tagged objects. They introduce a nonlinear interpolation method and the concept of credibility of reference tags, which not only achieves robustness to abnormal tags but also dramatically improves the positioning precision. They provide detailed simulations to evaluate the proposed technique.

The next paper by S. Madhavi and T. H. Kim proposes a network model for the USN called a power control collision interference-free model and a distributed data aggregation scheduling protocol, which is adaptive to the rate and power. The authors test the protocol in a USN with different topologies and varying degrees. The results prove that the proposed power control collision interference-free model yields better results.

The paper by W. Z. Khan et al. surveys and classifies the existing detection schemes for nodes replication attack in wireless sensor networks. It comprehensively explores the various proposals in each category. The authors have taken a glance at some technical details and comparisons so as to demonstrate limitations of the existent detections as well as effective contributions.

The paper Ohood et al. performs a secure way based on biometric for WSN environment. The proposed protocol involves simple operations and light computations. The main advantage of the proposed protocol is using the user’s iris to regenerate the user’s key on-the-fly every time the user wants be authenticated which dramatically enhances security aspects in WSNs.

In the paper by S.-H. Hong et al. proposes a simple cluster-based data aggregation and routing algorithm (SCAR) that decreases the incurred overhead during the selection of cluster heads in wireless sensor networks. The performance results show that SCAR can prolong network lifetime via energy conservation and achieve energy balancing when nodes are fixed or have limited mobility.

In their paper, Yoo et al. propose a robust user authentication scheme, which fixes the security weaknesses of previous solutions and provides wider usability considering the use case when the sensor nodes cannot communicate with the gateway node. Once the solution is described, its security is ensured by formal proof and analysis against attacks. Additionally, performance and cost analysis are executed to determine its level of feasibility for real implementation.

The paper by X. Guo and Q. Luo presents a multisecret sharing scheme with application on multimedia sensor networks. The proposed scheme can reliably conceal private information. They perform security analysis and show that their proposed scheme provides secure, robust and trustworthy verification of dealer and participants over insecure wireless multimedia sensor networks.

In their paper, S. Ullah et al. present the key features of the IEEE 802.15.6 standard. The MAC, PHY, and security specifications of the standard are explained in detail. Different communication modes and access mechanisms are also presented. The narrowband (NB), ultra-wideband (UWB), and Human Body Communications (HBC) specifications are reviewed in terms of frame structure, modulation, and other important parameters. Finally, S. Ullah et al. highlight the security paradigm and services of the standard.

In their paper, G. Yang et al. propose a precision-enhanced and encryption-mixed privacy-preserving data aggregation (PEPDA). The objective is to reduce collision during data transmission and energy consumption and to compensate loss caused by the collision. Based on the Slice-Mix-AggRegaTe (SMART) scheme, it optimizes data slicing by using small data packet, node classifying, and positive and negative data slicing techniques. It also describes a randomized time slot and a data compensation algorithm. Theoretical analysis and simulation show that PEPDA demonstrates a good performance in terms of accuracy, complexity, and security.

In their paper, H. Wang and B. Yin perform image authentication in a wireless multimedia sensor network (WMSN). To verify the authenticity, creditability, and integrity of the received image in WMSNs, they propose a perceptual hashing-based robust image authentication scheme. The experimental results show that their scheme can provide compactness, visual fragility, perceptual robustness, and security.

In their paper, to remedy security flaws of Yeh et al.’s published protocol, W. Shi and P. Gong proposes a new authentication protocol for wireless sensor networks using elliptic curves cryptography. They perform security analysis and performance comparison and show that their improved scheme is more secure and efficient than the original one.

The paper by Ribeiro et al. proposes an address self-assignment protocol, which: uses negative acknowledgements and a flood control mechanism to minimize the energy spent; uses a technique named whispering to achieve robustness against malicious nodes; is able to detect dynamic network rejoint and dynamic node addition without exchanging specific messages; and handles both dynamic events without compromising routing tables.

The paper by W. Z. Khan et al. provides a mechanism for secure actor directed localization technique in wireless sensor and actor networks. It helps to locate a sensor node efficiently and effectively. Different security algorithms are tested to eliminate the possibility of attacks and registration of attacker nodes with other legitimate nodes in the network. The proposed technique prevents man-in-the-middle attacks and securely delivers data to the destination.

A paper of this special issue is contributed by Yu et al., in which they analyze security requirements on data collection and transmission from WSNs in the context of IoT and point out that it is imperative to resist node compromise attacks as well as DoS attacks without requiring the use of any per-shared keys. Therefore, they propose a data authentication and enroute filtering scheme, referred to as DAEF. They also analyze energy consumption to show the advantages of DAEF over some comparable schemes.

Muhammad Khurram Khan

Yang Xiang

Shi-Jinn Horng

Hsiao-Hwa Chen