Trustworthy Wireless Industrial Sensor Networks

The deployment of sensor networks into industrial environments has attracted a lot of several business domains over the past years. As a result, an increasing number of applications are developed in several business domains, ranging from defense, public security, energy management and traffic control to health care. Sensor networks are particularly interesting due to their ability to control and monitor physical environments. Nevertheless, several technical (e.g. remote management, deployment) and security (e.g. user’s privacy, data confidentiality and reliability) challenges deter that integration. The Trustworthy Wireless Industrial Sensor Networks (TWISNet) project funded by the European Union was aimed at supporting and securing the integration of sensor networks into large scale industrial environments.

In the scope of TWISNet, a number of use cases, from nuclear plant facility to supply and demand energy management, which illustrate the integration of sensor networks into industrial environments are currently been considered. From those use cases, user’s privacy, node authentication and data reliability appear as the most important security requirements.

The TWISNet project has been providing a platform enabling business application to command and control sensor network in a secure and trusted way. Integrating commercial off-the-shelf or pre-standard devices, that platform serves as a mediation layer between the sensor network and industrial applications. Empowered with security architecture addressing the major business application security requirements (e.g. user’s privacy, data confidentiality, reliability), that platform is validated based on the identified use cases.

The scientific and technical outcome of TWISNet has contributed to standards, such as IETF 6lowpan (Standard). These standards will be enhanced to make them capable of addressing the use cases proposed by the project.

TWISNet is intended to end a three year contract with EU in September 2013.

TWISNet’s key objective was to provide a platform for an efficient, secure and reliable integration of sensor networks into large scale industrial environments.

twisnet pic 1

Therefore, a number of use cases is defined, to demonstrate the enabling technologies in terms of

• (Re-)authentication

• Remote credential provisioning

• Privacy

• Connection sharing

• Trustworthy architecture

• Adaptive security

• Trusted and secure sensor data processing

and bringing them into systems as presented in the figure below.

twisnet pic 2

Results from integration are intended to contribute to standardization and regulation.

The TWISNet project will achieve its goals in three technical work packages and one dissemination work package. These work packages interact with each other as shown in the figure below.

twisnet pic 3

TWISNet is going to give workshop at The 8th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security ARES Sep 04, 2013 in Regensberg, Germany. The workshop aims on presenting and discussing the results of the research and development that has been done on WSN security in TWISNet. The focus of the workshop lies on the concrete application of the designed security framework to IPv6 sensor environments, where certain scenarios and threat models are investigated to define requirements on a secure wireless sensor network for industrial application.

A presentation on the architectural concept can be found here.

Source : TWisNet