A role-based access in a hierarchical sensor network architecture to provide multilevel security

Most of the proposed security protocols for wireless sensor networks (WSN) are designed to provide the uniform level of security across the network. There are various multi-sensing applications like sensors monitoring airport runway control system which may also be used to monitor environmental conditions such as wind speed and direction. When these nodes communicate, they may require different levels of security. For example, in case of a highjack event, the secure communication among nodes in a target region in the airport runway control system should be provided as they exchange highly critical data. In this paper, we propose a scheme called role-based access in sensor networks (RBASH) which provides role-based multilevel security in sensor networks. Each group is organized in such a way that they can have different roles based on the context and thus, can provide or have different levels of accesses. RBASH provides the desired security level based on the application need. The multilevel security is based on assigned keys to different nodes at different levels. To achieve this goal, we organize the network using Hasse diagram then compute the key for each individual node and extend it further to construct the key for a group. Based on experimental observations, we conclude that RBASH is energy and communication efficient in providing security compared to some other protocols which provides uniform security for all the nodes.