Full paper: Postscript, PS.GZ, PDF

Introduction

 

We envision a future where thousands to millions of small sensors form self-organizing wireless networks. How can we provide security for these sensor networks? Security is not easy; compared with conventional desktop computers, severe challenges exist -- these sensors will have limited processing power, storage, bandwidth, and energy.

Despite the challenges, security is important for these devices. As we describe below, we are deploying prototype wireless network sensors at UC Berkeley. These sensors measure environmental parameters and we are experimenting with having them control air conditioning and lighting systems. Serious privacy questions arise if third parties can read or tamper with sensor data. In the future, we envision wireless sensor networks being used for emergency and life-critical systems - and here the questions of security are foremost.

This paper presents a set of Security Protocols for Sensor Networks, SPINS. The chief contributions of this paper are:

• Exploring the challenges for security in sensor networks.
• Designing and developing $\mu$TESLA(the ``micro'' version of the Timed, Efficient, Streaming, Loss-tolerant Authentication Protocol), providing authenticated streaming broadcast.
• Designing and developing SNEP(Secure Network Encryption Protocol) providing data confidentiality, two-party data authentication, and data freshness, with low overhead.
• Designing and developing an authenticated routing protocol using SPINS building blocks.