On a Framework for Energy-Efficient Security Protocols in Wireless Networks (original) (raw)

Analysis of tradeoffs between security strength and energy savings in security protocols for WLANs

Vehicular Technology, IEEE Conference, 2004

Energy sayings are extremely important in wireless networks where devices operate using battery power. Security in wireless networks is also becoming crucial with the deployment of wireless local area networks in hot spot areas, organizations, hospitals and so on. Security protocols depend on energy consuming operations that occur in the cryptographic primitives used in the protocols. It has been observed

Analyzing the Energy Consumption of Security Algorithms for Wireless LANs

International Journal of Computer Theory and Engineering, 2009

Security in wireless networks is of paramount importance. Due to the broadcast nature of the wireless radio signals, wireless networks are implicitly vulnerable to several network attacks. Anyone within the wireless transmission range of a device (including malicious users or attackers) is able to passively listen to or eavesdrop on the signals and could potentially access information from the signals. It is also possible to actively transmit signals that can attack the network. Encryption algorithms play good roles in information security systems (ISS). Those algorithms consume a significant amount of computing resources such as CPU time, memory, and battery power. Wireless devices are powered by a battery which is a very limited resource. It implicitly says that the power of computing will grow exponentially. However, the capacity of batteries is growing linearly, and this introduces a "power gap" which is the difference between the power required by computing and the battery capacity. Thus, battery power tends to be a very seriously limited resource for small wireless devices, and a security protocol should utilize energy to the minimum extent possible. This aspect is the primary focus of this dissertation. This paper illustrates the key concepts of security, wireless networks, and security over wireless networks. It provides evaluation of six of the most common encryption algorithms on power consumption for wireless devices A comparison has been conducted for those encryption algorithms at different settings for each algorithm such as different sizes of data blocks, different data types, battery power consumption

An energy efficient security protocol for IEEE 802.11 WLANs

Pervasive and Mobile Computing, 2006

Security protocols in wired and wireless networks make use of computationally intensive cryptographic primitives and several message exchanges for authenticated key exchange at the session-level and data confidentiality and integrity at the packet level. Moreover, changes in connectivity require mobile stations to repeatedly authenticate themselves thereby expending more energy. In this paper, we propose an energy efficient security protocol for wireless local area networks (WLANs) that employs (a) different cryptographic primitives based on their suitability in terms of energy consumption and security level (b) different levels of security and types of security services depending on the type of packet in 802.11 WLANs and (c) a light-weight hashed key chain to reduce the number of expensive authentication transactions due to connectivity losses. We use packet traces from three different networks to compare the performance of the energy efficient security protocol with that of the standard 802.11 WLAN security protocol and show significant reduction in energy consumption.

A Study of the Energy ConsumptionCharacteristics of CryptographicAlgorithms and Security Protocols

Security is becoming an everyday concern for a wide range of electronic systems that manipulate, communicate, and store sensitive data. An important and emerging category of such electronic systems are battery-powered mobile appliances, such as personal digital assistants (PDAs) and cell phones, which are severely constrained in the resources they possess, namely, processor, battery, and memory. This work focuses on one important constraint of such devices-battery life-and examines how it is impacted by the use of various security mechanisms. In this paper, we first present a comprehensive analysis of the energy requirements of a wide range of cryptographic algorithms that form the building blocks of security mechanisms such as security protocols. We then study the energy consumption requirements of the most popular transport-layer security protocol: Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). We investigate the impact of various parameters at the protocol level (such as cipher suites, authentication mechanisms, and transaction sizes, etc.) and the cryptographic algorithm level (cipher modes, strength) on the overall energy consumption for secure data transactions. To our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive analysis of the energy requirements of SSL. For our studies, we have developed a measurement-based experimental testbed that consists of an iPAQ PDA connected to a wireless local area network (LAN) and running Linux, a PC-based data acquisition system for real-time current measurement, the OpenSSL implementation of the SSL protocol, and parameterizable SSL client and server test programs. Based on our results, we also discuss various opportunities for realizing energy-efficient implementations of security protocols. We believe such investigations to be an important first step toward addressing the challenges of energy-efficient security for battery-constrained systems.

A Variation of the WTLS Authentication Protocol for Reducing Energy Consumption in Wireless Devices

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2004

Energy efficiency has been an important factor in protocol design in wireless networks where small handheld wireless devices rely solely on battery power. Security is also of great concern in wireless networks. Several security protocols adapted from wired networks have been used in wireless networks to provide identity authentication. Security protocols could contribute significantly to energy consumption, especially authentication protocols such as Wireless Transport Layer Security (WTLS) or Transport Layer Security (TLS) Handshake protocol that are based on computationally intensive public key cryptography. There have been many efforts trying to reduce cryptographic load and energy consumption at wireless devices. Some are complicated and others may not comply with existing WTLS/TLS standards. In this paper, we propose a simple variant of TLS Handshake protocol for mutual authentication and key exchange, which reduces energy consumption in wireless devices. The proposed protocol uses RSA and ECC algorithms differently to make the Handshake protocol more energy efficient. With our proposed protocol, we can save about 25% compared to 1024-bit RSA or 70% compared to 163-bit ECC Handshake protocol. Our proposed protocol can also be easily integrated into the standard WTLS protocol with small modification.

Comparison of security protocols in mobile wireless environments: tradeoffs between level of security obtained and battery life

Security and Privacy for …, 2005

As the popularity of wireless networks increases, so does the need to protect them. In recent years, many researchers have studied the limitations of the security mechanisms that protect wireless networks, as well as the effects of network traffic on the battery life. However, there has been less research on the effect of adding security mechanisms to mobile devices and their impact on energy usage. This is a particularly important area when one considers a class of attacks where an attacker can drain a device's battery by simply having it repeadly execute energy intensive programs. In this manuscript, we examine a method for analyzing trade-offs between energy and security proposed by Colón Osorio et al. This research describes a method to identify the most appropriate security profile for a given application, given battery constraints. We apply this methodology to the analysis of tradeoffs between energy utilization and security of current and proposed wireless protocols.

Energy conserving security mechanisms for wireless sensor networks

annals of telecommunications - annales des télécommunications, 2009

Since wireless sensor networks are emerging as innovative technologies for realizing a variety of functions through a number of compact sensor nodes, security must be justified and ensured prior to their deployment. An adversary may compromise sensor nodes, forcing them to generate undesired data, and propagation of these data packets through the network results in wasteful energy consumption. We develop a security mechanism to detect energy-consuming useless packets, assuming that a sensor node is able to generate multiple message authentication codes (MAC) using preshared secrets. The forwarding nodes along the path verify the validity of the packet by checking the authenticity of the attached MACs. This mechanism performs well when a malicious node does not have all the cryptographic keys. However, packets, generated by the malicious node having all the keys, would be considered as legitimate, and thus, the forwarding nodes become unable to detect and discard them. To deal with this problem, we devise another mechanism in which each forwarding node is capable of checking such suspicious nodes. We have quantified the security strength through analysis and simulations to show that the proposed mechanisms make the entire network energy conserving.

Analysis of Energy Consumed by Secure Session Negotiation Protocols in Wireless Networks

2003

Traditionally, researchers have focused on security, complexity, and throughput metrics while designing security protocols for wired networks. Deployment of these security protocols in battery-powered mobile devices has elevated energy consumption into an important design metric. In this paper we study the energy consumption characteristics of secure session negotiation protocols used by IPSec and WTLS protocols. Based on this study we present techniques to optimize energy consumed by secure wireless session negotiation protocols. Proposed techniques achieve 4× to 32× energy savings without compromising the security of wireless sessions. We show that these techniques are platform independent and discuss the impact of platform specific characteristics, such as available system resources, on the presented techniques.

A Survey of Energy Efficient Security Architectures and Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

Data security and energy aware communication are key aspects in design of modern ad hoc networks. In this paper we investigate issues associated with the devel-opment of secure IEEE 802.15.4 based wireless sensor net-works (WSNs) – a special type of ad hoc networks. We fo-cus on energy aware security architectures and protocols for use in WSNs. To give the motivation behind energy efficient secure networks, first, the security requirements of wireless sensor networks are presented and the relationships between network security and network lifetime limited by often in-sufficient resources of network nodes are explained. Second, a short literature survey of energy aware security solutions for use in WSNs is presented. Keywords—energy aware security architectures, routing proto-cols, security protocols, wireless sensor networks, WSN.

Efficient Security Based Energy Conservative Scheme for Wireless Ad hoc Networks

2014

For ad hoc networks energy conservation is most important. Utilizing the available limited amount of energy in the available network in the most efficient and reliable way is perhaps the greatest challenge faced by an ad-hoc network. Although there have been lots of protocols proposed to deal with this problem faced, however they do not provide a complete and energy efficient network. In this paper, we develop energy consumption scheme along with security measures that take into account energy consumption due to data packets, control packets and retransmission. We verify that our scheme match the actual energy consumption much better than existing models by simulation. In addition, we demonstrate that a minimum energy routing protocol based on an accurate scheme of ours performs much better than those based on existing models. Keyboards: Power control, Energy efficiency, Wireless networks, Routing,