A Lightweight Authentication Framework for Fault-Tolerant Distributed WSN

Abstract

The vast production of resource-constrained wireless communication devices and the development of various techniques in recent years opens room for security concerns to overcome potential attacks. However, efficient methods are needed to reduce the trade-off between communication and computation complexities in resource-constrained wireless device communication. In this paper, we propose a lightweight fault-tolerant secure data communication framework that consists of Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) secure communication scheme, Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) based secure communication scheme and Elliptic Curve Integrated Encryption Scheme (ECIES) based authentication scheme for wireless sensor network communication using Message Passing Interface (MPI) parallel program platform. Further, we have implemented the proposed framework for a single sink node (scenario-1) and all sink nodes (scenario-2) scenarios with parallel threads using Linux Pthreads to improve the total execution time. It is observed that the overall execution time performance of ECC is better in scenario-2 whereas the performance of ECDH is better in scenario-1 when the number of sensors is greater than 200. It is also observed that enabling Linux Pthreads in ECC implementation guarantees the parallel execution of decryption process and the reduction in the overall execution time in both scenarios. The results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework in terms of execution time and memory use over simulated wireless network environments, making the proposed framework suitable for fault-tolerant wireless sensor communication applications.

Keywords

• Wireless sensor networks
• fault-tolerant communication
• elliptic curve cryptography
• lightweight authentication
• the Internet of Things
• key management