Abstract:
Water supply and sanitation services can no longer tolerate inefficiencies of their
traditional non-intelligent distribution infrastructures due to the growth of demand for
their uninterrupted services in quantity and quality wise. Wireless Sensor Networks can
be employed to address these issues in a'very cost effective manner. Already, Wireless
Sensor Networks have been started to utilize in some countries for implementing their
infrastructures of water supply and sanitation services as intelligent to provide better
services and reduce financial losses. Ensuring efficient and secure data communication
in Wireless Sensor Network is one ofthe major aspects in its wide range ofapplications.
But, security solutions developed for traditional networks are not suitable for Wireless
Sensor Networks due to its specific features. Many researches have been carried out to
propose suitable efficient and secure lightweight protocols for Wireless Sensor
Networks to improve their data communication.
In this project, an efficient and secure lightweight protocol has been proposed for
Wireless Sensor Networks. Many literatures related to various security threats, security
protocols and key management schemes of Wireless Sensor Networks have been
critically reviewed at the beginning of the study. Literatures regarding the pseudo
random number generators and hash algorithms relevant to these security architectures
have also been critiqued to analyse the suitability ofthem.
In 2004, Park and Shin have proposed a lightweight protocol called Lightweight
Security Protocol(LiSP). The salient feature of this protocol is the novel rekeying
mechanism to tradeoff between security and resource consumption for large scale
sensor networks. In 2006, Sun and coworkers have presented a lightweight security
protocol with similar key management scheme ofPark and Shin, but improved security
mechanism by employing a pseudo random number generator - Linear Congruential
Generator(LCG). In 2015, Jain and Ojha have identified that Park-Miller pseudo
random number generator is better than Linear Congruential Generator for the
lightweight security protocol. Further, in 2015, Ojha and Jain analysed some other
pseudo random generators to evaluate the performances of the lightweight security
protocol and concluded that Park-Miller pseudo random number generator is the most
suitable one. But, these studies didn’t consider Park-Miller’s latest recommendation, or
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other variations of the pseudo random number generators. Pseudo random number
generators play vital role in the security and efficiency of the lightweight protocols.
Moreover, It has been identified that Secure Hash Algorithm-l(SHA-l) employed in
this protocol has similar effect as pseudo random number generator in the security and
efficiency ofthe protocol.
Therefore, the performance of the lightweight protocol can be enhanced without
compromising its security features, by utilizing more appropriate pseudo random
number generator and hash function in its architecture.
So, the latter part of the project, the secure lightweight protocols having different
pseudo random number generators and secure hash algorithms have been designed and
implemented to evaluate their suitability for proposing an efficient and secure
lightweight protocol.
Implementations have been modeled and evaluated in MATLAB software which had
been recommended and utilized in many previous literatures for this purpose. Times
taken for the computations have been analysed with pseudo random number generators
and secure hash algorithms employed with their specific features.
The pseudo random number generator, LCG Sheffield, has been identified as a most
suitable pseudo random number generator for the lightweight protocol. Secure Hash
Algorithm -1 proposed in the previous studies has been identified as a most efficient
hash function for the lightweight protocol.
This study proposes a secure lightweight protocol which is experimentally shown as, in
average, 5.7% more efficient than the secure protocol proposed in the study by Jain and
Ojha in 2015.