Secure Platform Over Wireless Sensor Networks

Homeland security and monitoring of critical infrastructures, such as buildings, bridges, nuclear power plants, aircrafts, etc., represent challenging application domains for modern networking technologies. In this context Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are gaining interest as a fundamental component of an advanced platform that embeds pervasive monitoring, networking and processing. Indeed, recent literature has addressed the perspectives of WSNs for monitoring structural and functional health of industrial plants, e.g. in (Akyildiz, et al., 2002; Bai et al., 2004; Barbaran et al., 2007; Cho et al., 2008; Flammini et al., 2008; Kim et al., 2007): nevertheless, we can observe that the dominating paradigm is to exploit WSNs features in terms of a “network of small sensors”, while almost unexplored is the more advanced paradigm of “networked smart sensors” and the underlying opportunity to actually support autonomous (anomaly) detection processes. A large body of specialized literature deals with this topic and several ad-hoc solutions can be found. On the contrary, we try to develop a different approach in this context: resorting to security mechanisms that are made available in traditional networks can provide a suitable and reliable framework, while smart adaptations are targeted to meet tight resource constraints and possible performance degradation.