AWISSENET stands for Ad-hoc personal area network & WIreless Sensor SEcure NETwork. It is an Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) project co-funded under EU's seventh framework (FP7) focusing on security and resilience across AWSN networks. The project’s official kick off was on January 2008 and its duration set to 26 months. The AWISSENET participant list includes 8 members spanning the industrial, academic and research domain.
Project Motivation edit
Ad-hoc Personal Area Networks and Wireless Sensor Networks (AWSN) are expected to form an integral part of the foreseen ubiquity intelligent, future mobile network and are envisaged to play a key role in offering mobile, personalised services, whenever and wherever needed, while supporting applications with broadband, wireless connectivity anytime and anywhere. Driven by this vision, AWISSENET project focuses on issues related to security and resilience across AWSN networks seeking to identify related issues and limitations as well as devise optimizations for a scalable, secure and context-aware networking.
Application domains that can benefit from the optimizations and improvements in sensor networking envisaged by AWISSENET include Smart Home & E-health, Intelligent Vehicles, Green & Ecological Aircraft and Homeland Security systems.
AWISSENET complements existing research carried out under the FP6 (SEVECOM, MAGNET, Ubisec&Sens) and aims to deliver answers to as yet unsolved problems and products long needed for the commercialisation of ad-hoc sensor networks, such as a prototyped protocol toolbox. The proposed architecture and protocol toolbox will be prototyped and validated in a large trial of more than 100 nodes, consisting of sensor/MOTEs, wireless cameras and RFID tags.
Issues & Research Topics edit
Identification of Security Holes edit
Design and implementation of a robust, attack-tolerant system at both the sensor/PAN platform level and the network level requires an exhaustive study of existing limitations such as:
- Node restrictions
- Channel restrictions
- Network restrictions
- Security restrictions
This will enable classification of threats and facilitate subsequent research activities.
Dynamic Trusted Routing edit
The research work studies and validates methods for providing safe and smart connectivity in a MANET. Routing protocols in ad hoc systems (i.e AODV) greatly differ from those used in wired or static networks to cater for the dynamic nature of AWSNs. Hardly any worlwide adopted standard exists. Some of the research problems to be considered include:
- How to elect a regional aggregator and how to find the shortest path to a destination, in a changing environment?
- What metadata should be exchanged for identification and discovery of the next node in the optimal path?
- How to evaluate the trustworthiness of an individual host?
- How to cope and react fast, when one or more nodes in the route disappear?
Secure Service Discovery edit
Secure Service discovery is quite difficult, especially when a node in AWSN roams or is crossing unknown administration domains or when interacting with public service providers. AWISSENET security architecture will protect service discovery messages inside the AWSN and when an interaction occurs with foreign devices. This will be achieved by relying on network-level security for intra-AWSN messages and on a reputation-based trust for interaction between the AWSN and foreign services.
Intrusion Detection, Intruder Identification and Recovery edit
Existing solutions for wired network Intrusion Detection Systems are not suitable for Ad hoc sensor networks. To enable intrusion detection in AWSN, the research problems are:
- How to efficiently collect normal and anomaly patterns of AWSN? Since the lifetime of the hosts is short ad hoc networks usually lack concentration points (router, switch).
- How to detect anomalies? The loss of traffic i.e. may be caused by host movement instead of attacks.
While for intruder identification important questions are:
- How to identify the source of an attack?
- How to restrict the attack effect within certain vicinity in real-time?
Sensor Node Protocol Stack specification edit
Wireless ad hoc sensor nodes usually operate over a strictly or partially battery energy limited environment. Energy efficiency should be carefully considered at every layer of the network protocols and algorithms. Typically security methods and energy efficiency methods are treated separately even though they are trade-off; for example, to strengthen security, the methods to support encryption techniques and manage a secret key may lead to increased power consumption.
AWISSENET defines a protocol stack that takes into consideration the above and can be implemented as a lightweight toolbox with minimal footprint and OS requirements adaptable to a large variety of nomadic and mobile tiny devices.
Configuration & Self Organization edit
Configuration of large scale applications utilizing wireless sensors can be a difficult and tedious task. AWISSENET targets smaller scale applications for Home Networks, e-health, industrial automation and security focusing in the implemention of a simple XML based configuration mechanism that allows rapid deployment of AWSNs.
External links edit
[[Category:FP7 Projects]]