Biblio

El paradigma de red personal (PN) permitirá la interacción y colaboración del creciente abanico de dispositivos personales. Con tal fin la PN ha de integrar en su seno múltiples tecnologías heterogéneas con diversas capacidades computacionales y de comunicación de forma segura. En particular, la incorporación de la tecnología RFID en objetos personales conlleva múltiples riesgos de seguridad y privacidad que han suscitado un elevado interés de la comunidad investigadora en los últimos años. Más allá de su seguridad de forma aislada, su integración en la PN y la interacción de ésta con redes de área extensa como Internet of Things requieren una arquitectura de red personal adecuada para tal contexto. Este artículo proporciona los fundamentos de tal arquitectura segura incluyendo el análisis de aspectos como la incorporación e inicialización de las restringidas etiquetas RFID en la red personal, la autenticación tanto de miembros de la PN como de usuarios y servicios remotos en su acceso a las tecnologías de contexto, el control de las políticas de privacidad y el establecimiento de canales seguros de comunicación supervisados.

Las Infraestructuras Críticas (ICs) son monitorizadas por sistemas altamente complejos, conocidos como sistemas SCADA (Sistemas de Control y Adquisición de Datos), cuyo principal soporte se encuentra en las subestaciones, las cuales miden de primera instancia el estado real de tales ICs. Para mejorar este control, la industria está actualmente demandando la integración en el modelo tradicional de dos avances tecnológicos: Internet y las redes de sensores inalámbricas. Sin embargo, su incorporación requiere analizar los requisitos de seguridad que surgen en dicho contexto, así como diversos aspectos correlacionados (ej. mantenimiento, rendimiento, seguridad y optimización) y, en base a estos, la estrategia de integración más adecuada para satisfacer dichos requisitos. Este artículo proporciona dicho análisis en profundidad con el fin de ofrecer un modelo de integración seguro adecuado para entornos críticos.

Los patrones de tráfico característicos de las redes inalámbricas de sensores (WSNs) dan lugar al problema de la privacidad de localización. De manera similar, el tráfico de los usuarios en Internet revela información sensible que puede ser protegida mediante sistemas de comunicación anónima (ACS). Por ello, este trabajo analiza la posibilidad de adaptar las soluciones de anonimato tradicionales al problema particular de las redes de sensores. Hasta el momento estas soluciones habían sido rechazadas sin un análisis riguroso, argumentando simplemente que eran demasiado exigentes computacionalmente para los nodos sensores. Nuestros resultados demuestran que, en general, algunos ACS no cumplen los requisitos de privacidad necesarios en WSNs mientras que otros, que si los cumplen, se valen de una cantidad de recursos que superan la capacidad de los sensores.

Las infraestructuras críticas, como el sector energético, la banca, el transporte, y muchas otras, son un pilar esencial para en bienestar de la sociedad y la economía de un país. Estas infraestructuras dependen a su vez de ciertas infraestructuras de información, las cuales permiten su correcto funcionamiento. La tarea de proteger esas infraestructuras (de información) críticas es compleja y multidimensional, con una gran cantidad de desafíos por resolver. Precisamente, las redes de sensores pueden ser de gran ayuda para esta tarea, debido a suscapacidades de control distribuidas y a su habilidad de funcionar en situaciones extremas. Este artículo analiza la utilidad de las redes de sensores en este contexto, describiendo tanto sus capacidades como sus posibles roles y mecanismos de integración para la protección de infraestructuras (de información) críticas.

Security in wireless sensor networks is very limited due to highly-constrained hardware of sensor nodes. To protect services is necessary to use secure foundations, known as security primitives, like part of a protocol. Theses primitives must assure at least confidentiality in the communication channel, authentication of the peers involved in an information exchange, and integrity of the messages. There are many primitives such as symmetric encryption, hash functions and public key cryptography, but not all of them can be supported by sensor nodes since require high resource levels, for example memory. This paper contains a deep analysis of available and suitable security primitives for sensor nodes, as well as an analysis of hardware and software implementations. Besides, it has been developed an experiment with two implementations, and it has been created a new and improved version using the optimizations of each.

As sensor networks are more and more being implemented in real world settings, it is necessary to analyze how the different requirements of these real-world applications can influence the security mechanisms. This paper offers both an overview and an analysis of the relationship between the different security threats, requirements, applications, and security technologies. Besides, it also overviews some of the existing sensor network standards, analyzing their security mechanisms.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are becoming a key technology in the support of pervasive and ubiquitous services. The previous notion of PKC is too expensive for WSN has changed partially due to the existence of new hardware and software prototypes based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography and other PKC primitives. Then, it is necessary to analyze whether it is both feasible and convenient to have a Public Key Infrastructure for sensor networks that would allow the creation of PKC-based services like Digital Signatures.

It is commonly agreed that Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is one of the technologies that better fulfills features like the ones required by Critical (Information) Infrastructures. However, a sensor network is highly vulnerable against any external or internal attacks, thus network designers must know which are the tools that they can use in order to avoid such problems. In this paper we describe in detail a procedure (the KMS Guidelines), developed under our CRISIS project, that allows network designers to choose a certain Key Management System, or at least to know which protocol need to improve in order to satisfy the network requirements.

Wireless sensor networks are considered as an integral part of the Internet of Things paradigm. Not only they provide a virtual presence to elements of the real world, but also allow any computationalsystem to know about the physical state of those elements thanks to the use of embedded sensors. In order to belong to the Internet of Things, the elements of a sensor network can implement Internet protocols and services such as the TCP/IP stack and web services. Still, a question that must be raised at this point of time is whether all sensor network applications should be completely integrated into the Internet or not. The purpose of this paper is to analyze this question, reviewing the challenges and security requirements of Internet-enabled sensor networks.

Most of energy control or SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems are very dependent on advanced technologies and on traditional security mechanisms for protecting the a system against anomalous events. Security mechanisms are not enough to be used in critical systems, since they can only detect anomalous events occurring at a certain moment in time. For this reason it becomes of paramount importance the usage of intelligent systems with capability for preventing anomalous situations and reacting against them on time. This type of systems are, for example, Early Warning Systems (EWS). In this paper, we propose an EWS based on Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) (under the ISA100.11a standard) and reputation for controling the network behaviour. The WSN are organized into clusters where a Cluster Head (CH) is designated. This CH will contain a Reputation Manager Module. The usability of this approach is also analyzed considering a Smart Grid scenario.} keywords = {Critical Information Infrastructures, Sensor Networks, Early Warning Systems, Reputation, SCADA Systems, Smart Grid.

A way of controlling a cascading effect caused by a failure or a threat in a critical system is using intelligent mechanisms capable of predicting anomalous behaviours and also capable of reacting against them in advance. These mechanisms are known as Early Warning Systems (EWS) and this will be precisely the main topic of this paper. Specially, we present an EWS design based on a Wireless Sensor Network (using the ISA100.11a standard) that constantly supervise the application context. This EWS is also based on forensic techniques to provide dynamic learning capacities. As a result, this new approach will aid to provide a reliable control of incidences by offering a dynamic alarm management, identification of the most suitable field operator to attend an alarm, reporting of causes and responsible operators, and learning from new anomalous situations.

Security has been proven a crucial factor in the provision of data services and especially in the computer-related environments. While wired and wireless networks come to all sectors of everyday life, security tries to satisfy the growing needs for confidentiality, integrity and non-repudiation. There are many instances of security primitives and each one of them has different requirements in terms of processing power, word size, etc. Therefore, it is important to review the functionality of the less resource-demanding encryption algorithms in order to analyze their theoretical suitability to the existent sensor node hardware. Still, the constraints inherent to the sensor nodes advise against the total dependence on software-based implementations, even more in the case of expensive primitives.

Las aplicaciones basadas en localización proporcionan a los usuarios servicios personalizados dependiendo de su ubicación. Las estimaciones prevén que estos servicios se extenderán enormemente en los próximos años reportando grandes beneficios tanto a la industria como a los usuarios finales. Sin embargo, para que estos avances sean posibles se hace necesario analizar en profundidad las distintas implicaciones de seguridad y privacidad que la utilización de tales servicios pueden traer consigo a los usuarios. En este trabajo proponemos un sistema de localización que da soporte a la provisión de servicios basados en localización para entornos indoor y que se fundamenta en la tecnología de redes de sensores inalámbricos. En este esquema hemos tenido en cuenta diversos aspectos de seguridad y privacidad, prestando especial atención a la limitación extrema de recursos característica de las redes de sensores. Finalmente hemos desarrollado una prueba de concepto para comprobar la viabilidad de nuestro esquema dentro del ámbito del proyecto OSAmI.

If a wireless sensor network (WSN) is to be completely integrated into the Internet as part of the Internet of Things (IoT), it is necessary to consider various security challenges, such as the creation of a secure channel between an Internet host and a sensor node. In order to create such a channel, it is necessary to provide key management mechanisms that allow two remote devices to negotiate certain security credentials (e.g. secret keys) that will be used to protect the information flow. In this paper we will analyse not only the applicability of existing mechanisms such as public key cryptography and pre-shared keys for sensor nodes in the IoT context, but also the applicability of those link-layer oriented key management systems (KMS) whose original purpose is to provide shared keys for sensor nodes belonging to the same WSN.

Critical Infrastructures are complex and highly interconnected systems that are crucial for the well-being of the society. Any type of failure can cause significant damage, affecting one or more sectors due to their inherent interdependency. Not only the infrastructures are critical, but also the information infrastructures that manage, control and supervise them. Due to the seriousness of the consequences, the protection of these critical (information) infrastructures must have the highest priority. It is the purpose of this book chapter to review and discuss about these infrastructures, to explain their elements, and to highlight their research and development issues. This chapter will also discuss the role of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technology in the protection of these infrastructures.

Critical Infrastructures, such as energy, banking, and transport, are an essential pillar to the well-being of the national and international economy, security and quality of life. These infrastructures are dependent on a spectrum of highly interconnected information infrastructures for their smooth, reliable and continuous operation. The field of protecting such Critical Information Infrastructures, or CIIP, faces numerous challenges, such as managing the secure interaction between peers, assuring the resilience and robustness of the overall system, and deploying warning and alert systems, amongst others. In this tapestry of CIIP, Wireless Sensor Networks can be used as an invaluable tool due to their intelligent distributed control capabilities, alongside with their capability to work under severe conditions. In this paper, we justify why Wireless Sensor Networks technology is suitable for providing security for these scenarios, describing both their advantages and research issues and their role in the overall scheme of protecting the Critical Information Infrastructures.

Energy distribution systems are becoming increasingly widespread in today’s society. One of the elements that is used to monitor and control these systems are the SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems. In particular, these control systems and their complexities, together with the emerging use of the Internet and wireless technologies, bring new challenges that must be carefully considered. Examples of such challenges are the particular bene¯ts of the integration of those new technologies, and also the e®ects they may have on the overall SCADA security. The main task of this paper is to provide a framework that shows how the integration of di®erent state-of-the-art technologies in an energy control system, such as Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs), and the Internet, can bring some interesting benefits such as status management and anomaly prevention, while maintaining the security of the whole system.

Nowadays, critical control systems are a fundamental component contributing to the overall performance of critical infrastructures in our society, most of which belong to the industrial sector. These complex systems include in their design different types of information and communication technology systems, such as wireless (mesh) sensor networks, to carry out control processes in real time. This fact has meant that several communication standards, such as Zigbee PRO, WirelessHART, and ISA100.11a, have been specified to ensure coexistence, reliability, and security in their communications. The main purpose of this paper has been to review these three standards and analyze their security. We have identified a set of threats and potential attacks in their routing protocols, and we consequently provide recommendations and countermeasures to help Industry protect its infrastructures.

Key management in wireless sensor networks (WSN) is an active research topic. Due to the fact that a large number of key management schemes (KMS) have been proposed in the literature, it is not easy for a sensor network designer to know exactly which KMS best fits in a particular WSN application. In this article, we offer a comprehensive review on how the application requirements and the properties of various key management schemes influence each other. Based on this review, we show that the KMS plays a critical role in determining the security performance of a WSN network with given application requirements. We also develop a method that allows the network designers to select the most suitable KMS for a specific WSN network setting. In addition, the article also addresses the issues on the current state-of-the-art research on the KMS for homogeneous (i.e. non-hierarchical) networks to provide solutions for establishing link-layer keys in various WSN applications and scenarios.

Key Management Schemes (KMS) are a very important security mechanism for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), as they are used to manage the credentials (i.e. secret keys) that are needed by the security primitives. There is a large number of available KMS protocols in the literature, but it is not clear what should network designers do to choose the most suitable protocol for the needs of their applications. In this paper, we consider that given a certain set of application requirements, the network designer can check which properties comply with those requirements and select the KMS protocols that contains those particular properties. Therefore, we study the relationship between requirements and properties, and we provide a web tool, the SenseKey tool, that can be used to automatically obtain an optimal set of KMS protocols.

In a wireless sensor network environment, a sensor node is extremely constrained in terms of hardware due to factors such as maximizing lifetime and minimizing physical size and overall cost. Nevertheless, these nodes must be able to run cryptographic operations based on primitives such as hash functions, symmetric encryption and public key cryptography in order to allow the creation of secure services. Our objective in this paper is to survey how the existing research-based and commercial-based sensor nodes are suitable for this purpose, analyzing how the hardware can influence the provision of the primitives and how software implementations tackles the task of implementing instances of those primitives. As a result, it will be possible to evaluate the influence of provision of security in the protocols and applications/scenarios where sensors can be used.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been proven a useful technology for perceiving information about the physical world and as a consequence has been used in many applications such as measurement of temperature, radiation, flow of liquids, etc. The nature of this kind of technology, and also their vulnerabilities to attacks make the security tools required for them to be considered in a special way. The decision making in a WSN is essential for carrying out certain tasks as it aids sensors establish collaborations. In order to assist this process, trust management systems could play a relevant role. In this paper, we list the best practices that we consider are essential for developing a good trust management system for WSN and make an analysis of the state of the art related to these practices.

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) behave as a digital skin, providing a virtual layer where the information about the physical world can be accessed by any computational system. As a result, they are an invaluable resource for realizing the vision of the Internet of Things (IoT). However, it is necessary to consider whether the devices of a WSN should be completely integrated into the Internet or not. In this paper, we tackle this question from the perspective of security. While we will mention the different security challenges that may arise in such integration process, we will focus on the issues that take place at the network level.