Efficient and dynamic access control mechanism for secure data acquisition in IoT environment

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is an essential constituent of IoT based smart city applications.WSN is one of the prominent sensing technologies for data acquisition in smart surveillance and monitoring applications. However, the deployment of a new node in the WSN is a critical security concern. The new node deployment within WSN is inevitable due to the outage of power or nodes getting compromised by adversary attacks. The newly deployed node can be a malicious node that may disrupt and compromise the data acquisition process of IoT based smart applications. Thus for effective and secure new node deployment in WSN, an access control mechanism needs to be enforced. Many schemes have been suggested for access control within WSN, but the practical consideration has been ignored. In this paper, a secure and practical access control mechanism based on Elliptical Curve Cryptography (ECC) has been presented for secure data acquisition using WSN. The proposed access control scheme highlights and address the practical implementation issues, which include scalability and no interdependence on clock synchronization between the nodes in a WSN. A detailed comparative analysis with the existing scheme suggests a better tradeoff in terms of security and functional requirements as compared to the existing relevant schemes. The security strength of the proposed scheme has been formally validated using Scyther. Scyther analysis depicts that the proposed scheme is resistant against various active and passive attacks. The proposed scheme has also been simulated on TinyOS using the TOSSIM simulator to carry out a detailed energy analysis. Based on the simulation analysis, a new node requires only 178 mJ to join the WSN based data acquisition tier. The formal validation and simulation results suggest that the proposed scheme can be used for secure data acquisition using WSN for IoT based smart applications.