- Research Article
- Open access
- Published:
MAC Security and Security Overhead Analysis in the IEEE 802.15.4 Wireless Sensor Networks
EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking volume 2006, Article number: 093830 (2006)
Abstract
Sensor networks have many applications. However, with limited resources such as computation capability and memory, they are vulnerable to many kinds of attacks. The IEEE 802.15.4 specification defines medium access control (MAC) layer and physical layer for wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we propose a security overhead analysis for the MAC layer in the IEEE 802.15.4 wireless sensor networks. Furthermore, we survey security mechanisms defined in the specification including security objectives, security suites, security modes, encryption, authentication, and so forth. Then, security vulnerabilities and attacks are identified. Some security enhancements are proposed to improve security and to prevent these attacks such as same-nonce attack, denial-of-service attack, reply-protection attack, ACK attack, and so forth. Our results show that, for example, with 128-bit key length and 100 MIPS, encryption overhead is 10.28 
s per block, and with 100 MIPS and 1500-byte payload, the encryption overhead is as high as 5782.5
s.
References
IEEE 802.15.4 : Wireless Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) Specifications for Low-Rate Wireless Personal Area Networks (LR-WPANs). May 2003.
Zigbee Alliance http://www.zigbee.org
Howitt I, Gutierrez JA: IEEE 802.15.4 low rate—Wireless personal area network coexistence issues. Proceedings of IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking (WCNC '03), March 2003, New Orleans, La, USA 3: 1481-1486.
FIPS Publication 197 : Advanced Encryption Standard. U.S. DoC/NIST, 2001
FIPS Publication 46-3 : Data Encryption Standard (DES). U.S. DoC/NIST, October 1999
FIPS Publication 800-38C : Recommendation for Block Cipher Modes of Operation: The CCM Mode for Authentication and Confidentiality. N U.S. DoC/NIST, May 2004
Struik R: Security Resolutions 802.15.4. Doc. #: IEEE 802.15-04-0540-08. 2004
Sastry N, Wagner D: Security considerations for IEEE 802.15.4 networks. Proceedings of the ACM Workshop on Wireless Security (WiSe '04), October 2004, Philadelphia, Pa, USA 32-42.
Xiao Y, Sethi S, Chen H-H, Sun B: Security services and enhancements in the IEEE 802.15.4 wireless sensor networks. Proceedings of IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference (GLOBECOM '05), November-December 2005, St. Louis, Mo, USA 3:
Struik R:Formal Specification of the CCM
Mode of Operation. Doc. #: IEEE 15-04-0537-00-004bGranelli F, Boato G: A novel methodology for analysis of the computational complexity of block ciphers: Rijndael, Camellia and Shacal-2 compared. Proceedings of 3rd Conference one Security and Network Architectures (SAR '04), June 2004, La Londe, France
Mode of Operation. Doc. #: IEEE 15-04-0537-00-004bAuthor information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
About this article
Cite this article
Xiao, Y., Chen, HH., Sun, B. et al. MAC Security and Security Overhead Analysis in the IEEE 802.15.4 Wireless Sensor Networks. J Wireless Com Network 2006, 093830 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1155/WCN/2006/93830
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1155/WCN/2006/93830