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Blink ’Em All: Scalable, User-Friendly and Secure Initialization of Wireless Sensor Nodes

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Book cover Cryptology and Network Security (CANS 2009)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 5888))

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Abstract

Wireless sensor networks have several useful applications in commercial and defense settings, as well as user-centric personal area networks. To establish secure (point-to-point and/or broadcast) communication channels among the nodes of a wireless sensor network is a fundamental security task. To this end, a plethora of so-called key pre-distribution schemes have been proposed in the past, e.g., [25][9][19][8][5]. All these schemes, however, rely on shared secret(s), which are assumed to be pre-loaded onto the sensor nodes, e.g., during the manufacturing process.

In this paper, we consider the problem of user-assisted secure initialization of sensor network necessary to bootstrap key pre-distribution. This is a challenging problem due to the level of user burden involved in initializing multiple (often large number of) sensor nodes and lack of input and output user-interfaces on sensor motes. We propose a novel method for secure sensor node initialization based on a visual out-of-band channel that utilizes minimal output interface in the form of LED(s) already available on most off-the-shelf sensor motes. The proposed method requires only a little extra cost, is efficient and reasonably scalable. Moreover, based on a usability study that we conducted, the method turns out to be quite user-friendly and easy to administer by everyday computer users.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science and Engineering, Polytechnic Institute of New York University,  

    Nitesh Saxena & Md. Borhan Uddin

Authors
  1. Nitesh Saxena
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  2. Md. Borhan Uddin
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. AT&T Labs Research, Florham Park, NJ, USA

    Juan A. Garay

  2. Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST), Nomi, Ishikawa, Japan

    Atsuko Miyaji

  3. National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technoloy (AIST), Tokyo, Japan

    Akira Otsuka

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© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Saxena, N., Uddin, M.B. (2009). Blink ’Em All: Scalable, User-Friendly and Secure Initialization of Wireless Sensor Nodes. In: Garay, J.A., Miyaji, A., Otsuka, A. (eds) Cryptology and Network Security. CANS 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5888. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10433-6_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10433-6_11

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-10432-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-10433-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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