Among the classes of wireless personal area networks, a wireless sensor network typically refers to a versatile and densely distributed sensing platform that enables the support of a wide variety of application domains. Among the various technical challenges addressed by more than one decade of research in wireless sensor networks, security across wireless links is by far one of the most critical ones and relates to the need of guaranteeing reliability and trustiness of the collected data. This article deals with the cryptographic aspects involved in securing wireless sensor networks, in terms of confidentiality and authentication. In particular, moving from some results previously achieved in our research activity, this article extends a cryptography scheme in order to better comply with the security requirements that arise from real-world wireless sensor network installations. The proposed scheme, called topology-authenticated key scheme 2, takes advantage of hybrid cryptography to provide security in the presence of resource-constrained sensor nodes using topology-authenticated keys to provide increased robustness to the scheme itself. The proposed extensions provide full practical support to star-topology wireless sensor networks and the article presents also some experimental results obtained by implementing the scheme on two different wireless sensor network platforms available for protocol stacks compliant with the IEEE 802.15.4 standard.

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为 IEEE 802.15.4 无线传感器网络开发基于扩展拓扑的轻量级加密方案

在无线个域网的类别中，无线传感器网络通常是指能够支持各种应用领域的通用且密集分布的传感平台。在无线传感器网络十多年的研究解决的各种技术挑战中，无线链路的安全性是迄今为止最关键的挑战之一，涉及保证收集数据的可靠性和可信度的需要。本文从机密性和身份验证的角度讨论保护无线传感器网络所涉及的加密方面。特别是，从我们之前在研究活动中取得的一些成果，本文扩展了一种加密方案，以便更好地满足现实世界无线传感器网络安装产生的安全要求。所提出的方案称为拓扑认证密钥方案 2，它利用混合密码术在资源受限的传感器节点存在的情况下提供安全性，使用拓扑认证密钥为方案本身提供更高的鲁棒性。所提出的扩展为星形拓扑无线传感器网络提供了全面的实际支持，本文还介绍了通过在两个不同的无线传感器网络平台上实现该方案而获得的一些实验结果，这些平台可用于符合 IEEE 802.15.4 标准的协议栈。利用混合密码术在资源受限的传感器节点存在的情况下提供安全性，使用拓扑认证的密钥为方案本身提供更高的鲁棒性。所提出的扩展为星形拓扑无线传感器网络提供了全面的实际支持，本文还介绍了通过在两个不同的无线传感器网络平台上实现该方案而获得的一些实验结果，这些平台可用于符合 IEEE 802.15.4 标准的协议栈。利用混合密码术在资源受限的传感器节点存在的情况下提供安全性，使用拓扑认证的密钥为方案本身提供更高的鲁棒性。所提出的扩展为星形拓扑无线传感器网络提供了全面的实际支持，本文还介绍了通过在两个不同的无线传感器网络平台上实现该方案而获得的一些实验结果，这些平台可用于符合 IEEE 802.15.4 标准的协议栈。