Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have become an attractive topic for both academic research and the activity of R&D services due to their simple deployment and their potential of application in varied fields (military, environmental, industrial). A WSN is composed of a set of nodes that are supposed to operate and to be energetically autonomous for long durations. Thus, they are limited in memory and computing capacities, and constrained to function in a low-power transmission mode which limit their communication range and leave them with low data rates.The need to secure communications in a WSN depends on the criticality of the exchanged data for the supported application. The solution must be based on safe, confidential and reliable exchanges. To ensure the security of exchanges, cryptographic techniques exist in the literature. Originally designed for mostly wired computer networks, they are usually based on complex and resource-consuming algorithms. In this thesis, we have proposed, implemented and evaluated a secure and dynamic architecture suitable for WSNs communications. It ensures and maintains secured communications throughout the lifetime of a multi-hop network. We have used and adapted standard cryptographic algorithms, such as AES-CTR and algorithms based on ECC cipher suites, which allow our architecture to resist against most attacks. We have quantified the overhead of our solution in terms of computation time and memory occupancy. The results of implementation of our proposal are obtained through real measurements on testbeds using TelosB motes.
Contribution to the security of communications in wireless sensor networks