Assessing Security-Critical Energy-Efficient Sensor Networks

In the EYES project (http://eyes.eu.org), we are investigating self-organizing, collaborative, energy-efficient sensor networks. This study is devoted to the security aspects of the project. Our contribution is three-fold: firstly, we present a survey, where we discuss the dominant issues of energy-security trade-off in the network protocol and key management design space. From there we set out future research directions for our security framework. Secondly, we propose an assessment framework based on system profile, with which we have managed to carve out manageable design spaces from the seemingly infinite possibilities of ad hoc mobile wireless networks. Finally, we have benchmarked some well-known cryptographic algorithms in search for the best compromise in security and energy-efficiency, on a typical sensor node. Our preliminary investigations also cover an important parameter in the design space: the resource requirements of the symmetric key algorithms RC5 and TEA.