Security and Resilience of Data Shared and Exchanged within a Wireless Sensor Network Anna Sojka-Piotrowska, Krzysztof Piotrowski and Jana Krimmling IHP Im Technologiepark 25, 15236 Frankfurt (Oder), Germany sojka | piotrowski | krimmling@ihp-microelectronics.com ABSTRACT The data exchanged within the wireless sensor network often contains the information important to save the human lives, e.g. vital parameters of the firefighters during an action. The crucial issue here is that these data cannot be tampered or lost, thus the communication needs to be secured and resilient. Securing the data transmission within the sensor network has to take the constraints of the wireless sensor networks into consideration. The data resilience can be achieved by applying data redundancy supporting data storage or a distributed shared memory in the sensor network, also taking the network constraints into consideration. A distributed shared memory middleware provides means for data replication and sharing between the nodes in the sensor network. The data redundancy helps to reach the goal of a highly dependable network. Our proposal allows protecting the data within the distributed shared memory by using lightweight cryptography. Applying the lightweight cryptography reduces the time of the computations performed on the sensor nodes, what speeds up the delivery of the critical data to the control centers for example. Since the security related issues are an essential prerequisite for network dependability, providing a configurable and secured distributed shared memory is a very interesting topic. KEYWORDS Data Resilience, Secure Storage, Distributed Shared Memory, Wireless Sensor Networks, Lightweight Security 1 INTRODUCTION Nowadays the Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are used in applications in a plethora of areas, including these that reduce the risk in life or that support the daily life in diverse areas as protection of critical infrastructure (CI), protecting first responders in action, healthcare and habitat monitoring. Their benefits-the fact that they provide low cost and wirelessly networked devices with sensing capabilities, may also become their major pitfall, if the reliability of these devices cannot meet the dependability requirements of the applications. Compared to the wired sensors the sensor nodes have to cope with problems related to the energy sources and the communication in the freely accessible medium. A very important issue here is the network dependability. Using the redundant and distributed data sharing makes the system robust against data loss caused by lost nodes. And providing the mechanisms ensuring the data confidentiality further increases the reliability of the sensor network. In this paper we present the solution for increasing the dependability of the wireless sensor network by securing the shared data using the lightweight elliptic curves cryptography. Our approach is based on the elliptic curves lightweight security - shortECC 10[1] and on the data storage for wireless sensor networks - tinyDSM [3]. The shortECC solution was developed especially for low power and computational constrained devices, like the sensor nodes. It was designed to secure the exchange of short payloads, e.g., 32-bit Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Social Media, Thessaloniki, Greece, 2014 ISBN: 978-1-941968-04-8 ©2014 SDIWC 154