A Lightweight Quantum-Safe Security Concept for Wireless Sensor Network Communication

Abstract

The ubiquitous internetworking of devices in all areas of life is boosted by various trends for instance the Internet of Things. Promising technologies that can be used for such future environments come from Wireless Sensor Networks. It ensures connectivity between distributed, tiny and simple sensor nodes as well as sensor nodes and base stations in order to monitor physical or environmental conditions such as vibrations, temperature or motion. Security plays an increasingly important role in the coming decades in which attacking strategies are becoming more and more sophisticated. Contemporary cryptographic mechanisms face a great threat from quantum computers in the near future and together with Intrusion Detection Systems are hardly applicable on sensors due to strict resource constraints. Thus, in this work a future-proof lightweight and resource-aware security concept for sensor networks with a processing stage permeated filtering mechanism is proposed. A special focus in the concepts evaluation lies on the novel Magic Number filter to mitigate a special kind of Denial-of-Service attack performed on CC1350 LaunchPad ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller boards.