Tiny 3-TLS: A Trust Delegation Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Adapting security protocols to wireless sensor networks architectures is a challenging research field because of their specific constraints. Actually, sensors are computationally weak devices, unable to perform heavy cryptographic operations like classical asymmetric algorithms (RSA, Diffie-Hellman). In this paper, we introduce Tiny 3-TLS, an extension and adaptation of TLS handshake sub-protocol that allows establishing secure communications between sensing nodes and remote monitoring terminals. Our protocol aims at guaranteeing the integrity and confidentiality of communications between sensors and distant terminals, after having established mutual authentication between the two parties. In order to achieve these security goals without putting too much burden on sensing devices, Tiny 3-TLS rely on an intermediate node, the sink node. Depending on the trustworthiness of this sink node and on the applications, we propose two versions of our proposition. Besides, we provide a formal validation of the protocol’s security goals achievement and an evaluation of its computation and delay performances.