Access control in multi-party wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Emerging real world WSNs seldom exist as single owner, single application, isolated networks, but instead comprise of sensor nodes owned by multiple parties. These sensors offer multiple services to users locally or across the Internet, and travel between multiple WSNs. However, users should only have access to a limited subset of services. Due to a need for direct interactions of users with nodes, authentication and authorisation at the node level is critical. This paper presents an access control infrastructure consisting of three parts: 1) an authentication protocol to ensure authenticity of messages, 2) a role based authorisation framework to perform access control, and 3) a user management service to enable user and permission management. A prototype implementation on the ContikiOS demonstrates the validity and feasibility of node local role based access control on low power micro-controllers. © Springer-Verlag 2013.