Efficient and distributed access control for sensor networks

Abstract

Sensor networks are often used to sense the physical world and provide observations for various uses. In hostile environments, it is critical to control the network access to ensure the integrity, availability, and at times confidentiality of the sensor data. This paper develops efficient methods for distributed access control in sensor networks. The paper starts with a baseline approach, which provides a more flexible and efficient way to enforce access control when compared with previous solutions. This paper then extends the baseline approach to enable privilege delegation, which allows a user to delegate its privilege to other users without using a trusted server, and broadcast query, which allows a user to access the network at a large scale efficiently. The privilege delegation and broadcast query are very useful in practice; none of the current solutions can achieve these two properties. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.