Agent-based scalable design of a cross-layer security framework for Wireless Sensor Networks Monitoring Applications

Secure monitoring services supported by flexible, manageable, and cheap systems in areas where ordinary networks are unsuitable: this is one of to-day challenges in health monitoring engineering. Wireless Sensor Networks represent a promising technological solution but resource constraints and exposure to external attacks could limit their employment. The design and the implementation of an effective security to provide the monitoring service with the reasonable level of reliability is the scope of this paper. Following the platform-based design methodology, we have designed and implemented a “Secure Platform” to support Monitoring Applications which is compliant to requirements such as modularity, optimized usage of resource, solution scalability. To this aim, the Secure Platform exploits mobile agents and we have enhanced middleware solutions already available in literature. Security functions implemented in the Secure Platform have been a distributed intrusion detection system, based on a simplified approach to Hidden Markov Models, supported by an hybrid cryptographic scheme, based on network topology authentication. These security functions have been proposed by the same authors in [12] and [13]. Detailed design and the description of the software enhancements to the middleware platform are presented in this paper.