ASPIDA

Sensor networks have been developed rapidly the last years and they promise to be one of the basic infrastructures to support ambient intelligence. Currently, sensors are used in a wide spectrum of applications (e.g. military, medical, environmental) where they manage sensitive information. These applications require protection of the confidentiality, integrity and availability of data that is exchanged through the network and/or is stored locally on the sensors. However, the provided security is considerably limited by sensors' characteristics such as the limited energy, the small size of local memory and the lack of a universal identity.

Currently, most of the efforts and studies are concentrated around specific areas, ignoring a combination of security issues. Therefore, the need for designing a multi-layer security architecture for sensor networks is arised. The architecture will have to take into consideration not only the protection of sensor nodes but the security of the entire network.

The objective of this project is to design and develop a prototype of a security layer that will offer security services to sensor nodes. Security will be offered as a unified component that will be adapted based on the trustworthiness of the environment it will be implemented. The proposed layer will be evaluated against the energy and computational power needs, and if it is judged necessary hierarchical topologies will be investigated to include sensor nodes with enhanced resources. These nodes (e.g. team leaders) will undertake operations which have high resource requirements, supporting the effectiveness of the provided security. The designing of an appropriate security policy will further support the multi-layer security architecture. In addition, new security solutions will be proposed taking into consideration the restrictions of sensor nodes and giving emphasis on the interoperability and robustness of sensor nodes.

The innovation of this research work lies on the provision of a complete set of security services that will be adaptable on the characteristics of sensor nodes, the security requirements and the data that it is managed by the application. The generality of the architecture will support different applications, hiding the complexity of different security solutions under a unified frame.

In ASPIDA, a wireless sensor project, the company is contributing at the physical and network layer, with radio planning, routing, and security activities.