Definition and development of a Topology-based cryptographic scheme for wireless sensor networks

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a versatile and distributed sensing system that is able to support a wide variety of application domains. One of the most important issue in WSN design is to guarantee the reliability of the collected data which involves in turn security issues across wireless links. This paper deals with the cryptographic aspects in the broader field of security in WSNs. In particular, moving from some previous advances in our research activity, this manuscript proposes a novel cryptographic scheme that is compliant to security requirements that may arise from real-world WSN applications and reports some details about an implementation in TinyOS that we have carried for experimental validation. The proposed scheme, called TAKS2, exploits benefits from Hybrid Cryptography to handle resource constraints and allows to generate topology authenticated keys to provide increased robustness to the scheme itself.