Identity Based Authentication using a Cross Layer Design approach in Wireless Sensor Networks

The development of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) was originally motivated for military applications such as battlefield surveillance. However, in recent years it has gained popularity in many civilian applications: such as habitat monitoring, healthcare, home automation, traffic control and environmental monitoring. As more low cost, low power and multifunctional sensor nodes are being deployed, security in such sensor networks become one of the prominent issues in WSN. Recent advances in wireless networks did not give the necessary attention to security with regard to device constraints, since they base their design on legacy wireless networks. As more security solutions are being proposed in WSN, there is an increase in the lack of co-ordination between various security measures at different layers, leading to functional redundancy and increased overhead. As WSN scale to a very large number, current malicious node detection schemes will be resource intensive and inefficient Therefore, new approaches are being sought to efficiently use information from different protocol layers to propose security. They not only focus on layer interactions within a node, but also adapt to changes in the network conditions and adaptively optimize cross-layer interactions across different nodes. It has been shown that pairing based crypto operations are possible on sensor nodes (motes) and a completely new security suite is being developed for WSN using Identity based Cryptography. In this paper, we propose a new cross-layer design approach for WSN using Identity based cryptography. This approach combines cross-layer design principles along with Identity based Cryptography to provide a new set of security solutions, which could be more efficient in storage, computation and energy.