A PKI Adapted Model for Secure Information Dissemination in Industrial Control and Automation 6LoWPANs

Wireless sensor nodes have a wide span of applications ranging from industrial monitoring to military operations. These nodes are highly constrained in terms of battery life, processing capabilities, and in-built memory. Industrial wireless sensor networks (IWSNs) have to meet the constraints and peculiarities of industrial environments to ensure synchronization with parallel production processes. Applications of WSNs in industrial communication vary from condition monitoring and sensing to process automation. The 6LoWPAN standard enables efficient utilization of IPv6 protocol over low-power wireless personal area networks (LoWPANs). The use of 6LoWPANs for industrial communication necessitates the fulfillment of special QoS and security. We examine the aspect of secured information dissemination for industrial control and automation processes in this paper. Researchers have proposed several schemes to secure transfer of data over the Internet. Public key infrastructure (PKI) is one of the most popular security schemes being used in the present scenario. The hostile deployment scenarios of 6LoWPANs and resource constraints of the nodes necessitate the presence of a robust security mechanism to safeguard the communication. In this paper, we propose an integration scheme for PKI and 6LoWPAN to meet the enhanced security needs of industrial communication. The approach is to delegate a major portion of key management activity to the edge routers (gateway) of the LoWPAN and limit the involvement of the end nodes to minimal communication with the edge router. We do not propose a change in the current PKI, but we put forth a scheme to facilitate the integration of PKI to 6LoWPAN in an efficient manner. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm was evaluated using a protocol analyzer for normal 6LoWPAN traffic as well as HUI HC-01 compressed traffic. A marginal increase of 2% in channel utilization was observed, which scaled down to 1% using HUI HC-01 compression. The results indicated that the proposed algorithm can be implemented for industrial control and automation networks without any speed, security, or performance tradeoffs.

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