Securing Wireless Sensor Networks

Dr Ahmet Sekercioglu and Sophia Kaplantzis, Department of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering
This project explores the negative effects of malevolent hacking behaviour on Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and the data that they convey. WSNs are a new and upcoming type of wireless network, in which a large collection of small autonomous sensing devices communicate among themselves in order to monitor various phenomena that occur in the physical world around them. Some common applications of WSNs include critical infrastructure monitoring, traffic surveillance, military command, disaster recovery and smart home applications. One particular example to note is the Victorian Government's Advanced Metering Infrastructure project, in which 2.5 million household electricity meters equipped with wireless interfaces will be installed to form a large WSN in order to monitor the household energy consumption, almost in real-time. With such applications, it becomes apparent that the need for secure and reliable storage and transmission of the data conveyed by these networks is paramount.

The researchers in this project use the Monash Sun Grid to simulate the effects that various hacking attacks (black hole attacks, sinkhole and spoofing attacks) have on the network characteristics of various prominent ad hoc routing protocols (PEGASIS, LEACH, Directed Diffusion, and MTE). The simulation testbed is based on a discrete event simulator called OMNeT++.

The future work of this research team includes investigation of the benefits of intrusion detection systems for WSNs.