Avaliação de desempenho de mecanismos de segurança utilizados para prover os serviços de confidencialidade, integridade e autenticação em redes de sensores sem fio

Abstract

The number and diversity of applications for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have grown in the last decade what makes more relevant the concern about information security in such networks. For example, since the wireless physical medium makes these networks vulnerable to various types of attacks, there is then a need to use at least basic security services such as confidentiality, integrity, and authentication. However, providing security in WSN faces some challenges because of the severe limitations of processing, communication, power, and memory resources of the devices used in these networks. In this context, the selection of the most appropriate security mechanisms taking into consideration their performance is essential to provide information security in WSNs. On the other hand, the main results found in the literature that aim to assess the performance of security mechanisms in the context of a WSN differ in terms of the chosen platform and evaluated metrics, and present deficiencies in the performance assessment process used. This work then proposes a performance assessment using a systematic process, based on traditional performance analysis approaches, in which security mechanisms are selected, implemented and validated. The security mechanisms considered in this work are for that provide confidentiality, integrity, and authentication services in WSNs. Real experiments are carried out on the MicaZ platform with a digital oscilloscope to measure the performance of the chosen algorithms. With the obtained results a good direction for choosing the most appropriate security mechanisms for WSN applications is aimed as another contribution of this work.