Di-Sec: A distributed security framework for heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Abstract-Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are deployed for monitoring in a range of critical domains (e.g., health care, military, critical infrastructure). Accordingly, these WSNs should be resilient to attacks. The current approach to defending against malicious threats is to develop and deploy a specific defense mechanism for a specific attack. However, the problem with this traditional approach to defending sensor networks is that the solution for the Jamming attack does not defend against other attacks (e.g., Sybil and Selective Forwarding). In reality, one cannot know a priori what type of attack an adversary will launch. This work addresses the challenges with the traditional approach to securing sensor networks and presents a comprehensive framework, Di-Sec, that can defend against all known and forthcoming attacks. At the heart of Di-Sec lies the monitoring core (M-Core), which is an extensible and lightweight layer that gathers statistics relevant for the defense mechanisms. The MCore allows for the monitoring of both internal and external threats and supports the execution of multiple detection and defense mechanisms (DDMs) against different threats in parallel. Along with Di-Sec, a new user-friendly domain-specific language was developed, the M-Core Control Language (MCL). Using the MCL, a user can implement new defense mechanisms without the overhead of learning the details of the underlying software architecture (i.e., TinyOS, Di-Sec). Hence, the MCL expedites the development of sensor defense mechanisms by significantly simplifying the coding process for developers. The Di-Sec framework has been implemented and tested on real sensors to evaluate its feasibility and performance. Our evaluation of memory, communication, and sensing components shows that Di-Sec is feasible on today's resource-limited sensors and has a nominal overhead. Furthermore, we illustrate the basic functionality of Di-Sec by implementing and simultaneously executing DDMs for attacks at various layers of the communication stack (i.e., Jamming, Selective Forwarding, Sybil, and Internal attacks).

RAPID: Traffic-agnostic intrusion detection for resource-constrained wireless mesh networks

“…Although the problem formulation we present is based on Snort terminology (similarly to PRIDE), it can be generalized to other IDS, e.g., Bro or Di-Sec [47], with few minor changes based on their internals and functionality. For example, Di-Sec, a security framework proposed for resourceconstrained sensor networks, consists of several detection and defense modules, similar to the Snort detection modules, and several sub-components that can be modeled as Snort preprocessors.…”

Secure Multipurpose Wireless Sensor Networks

“…With Di-Sec [130] the authors propose a novel distributed intrusion detection system for WSNs. The system is designed to monitor the single sensor nodes in the background, so that it is transparent to WSN applications or tasks.…”

PHDA: A priority based health data aggregation with privacy preservation for cloud assisted WBANs

“…Therefore, the health data should be classified into different categories with different requirements (i.e., delay) and communication strategies. As communications are deeply involved in cloud assisted WBAN, security and privacy are of paramount importance [23]. All the data transmitted in health-care applications should be authenticated and secure against malicious modification.…”