Authentication in wireless sensor networks and applications

The potential of wireless sensor networks lies in the ease of their deployment, often in unknown topologies which cannot be accessed in any other way. However, they also pose new problems in terms of security. In particular, there is the problem of authenticating the nodes in the network so that we can rely on the information that they are providing. The problem is complicated by the severely resource-constrained nature of the nodes. In this talk we will discuss some of these challenges and propose possible solutions, based on novel authentication techniques that have been recently developed. In particular, we will discuss the notion of 'forward secure schemes' as introduced by Gunther and other authors, and the notion of ASHA, an authentication scheme based on the ERINDALE algorithm developed by Murty and Volkovs.