A Security Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

As sensor networks edge closer towards wide-spread placement, security issues become a central concern. So far, much research has concentrated on making sensor networks feasible and useful, and has not focused on security. We present a set of security building blocks optimized for resource constrained environments and wireless communication. SPINS has two secure building blocks: SNEP and TESLA. SNEP provides the following important baseline security primitives: Data confidentiality, two-party data authentication, and data freshness. A particularly hard problem is to provide effective broadcast authentication, which is an important mechanism for sensor networks. TESLA is a new protocol which provides authenticated broadcast for severely resource-constrained surroundings. We realized the above protocols, and show that they are practical straightly on minimal hardware: the performance of the protocol suite easily matches the data rate of our network. Additionally, we prove that the suite can be used for building higher level protocols.