International Journal of Research in Computer Engineering and Electronics.

Page # 1 VOl : 2 ISSUE :3 (June 2013)

ISSN 2319-376X

A Secure Model for Time Synchronization in Body Sensor Network

J. S. Lather
Abstract- In the recent years wireless sensor networks (WSN) have received a lot of attention due to wide range of applications such as health monitoring, agriculture, target tracking, environment monitoring, military operations, and scientific exploration in dangerous environments. The health monitoring system is one of emerging application area of WSN. A number of tiny wireless sensors nodes may be implantable or attached to the cloths on the human body to create a wireless body sensor network (WBSN) that can continuously monitor various vital signs of patients and provide real-time feedback to the user and medical personnel. Time synchronization is an important component of sensor networks to provide a common clock time in all sensor nodes. Time synchronization protocols offer a mechanism for synchronizing the local clocks of the nodes in a sensor network. In this paper a model for secure time synchronization in WBSN is proposed. Index Terms: Wireless sensor network, Body sensor network, Time synchronization commas.

1 INTRODUCTION

ireless sensor network (WSN) [1] is one of the fastest growing fields in the area of research. The sensor node is fundamental unit of WSN. A WSN is a collection of tiny small sensor nodes which are organized into a cooperative network. Each sensor node consists of processing capability via one or more microcontrollers, CPUs or DSP chips [2]. These nodes have power of sensing, measuring, and collect the information from the environment and, based on the assigned tasks, they can transmit the sensed data to the designated user or system. The power in sensor nodes is depends on battery. The size of battery is directly proportional to power of battery. The advances in battery technology are much slower than the recent advances that have taken place in the field of wireless communications and networks. In Section 2 and 3 Body Sensor Network (BSN) and Time synchronization for BSN are discussed respectively. An approach for time synchronization in WBSN is proposed in Section 4. Concluding remarks and future work are made in Section 5.

basic purpose of WNSN is to monitor the health of patient continuously whether he/she is at home or moving out side. The sensor nodes continuously monitor vital signs such as glucose levels, heart beats, Electrocardiography (ECG), body temperature, etc. in real-time fashion as shown in Fig. 1. If there is sudden change in vital signs, the sensor nodes after collecting the vital information about patient forwarded to healthcare center and relative of patients in real time fashion to take care of patient.

2 BODY SENSOR NETWORK

The health care system is one of the emerging fields of WSN. Body area sensor networks (BASNs) [3] is similar to WSN. It consist of multiple interconnected nodes may be implanted in human body or attached on wearable cloths, which have sensing, processing and communication capabilities. The

J. S. Lather is currently working as Associate Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering National Institute of Technology, Kurukshetra INDIA .

Figure 1: Human body equipped with sensor nodes

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International Journal of Research in Computer Engineering and Electronics.

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The three tier architecture of WBSN [3] is shown in Fig. 2. The tier-1 is responsible communication of data among sensor nodes in body area network only, tier-2 provides communication between body area sensor nodes and access points, and the tier-3 of architecture provides communication between access points to medical server, emergency services, patient family members etc. The information communicated between tier-1 and tier-3 must be secure because it contains vital information about the patient.

Figure 3: Architecture for Time Synchronization in BSN

Figure 2: Architecture in WBSN

3 TIME SYNCHRONIZATION IN BSN

Time synchronization among sensor nodes is one of the critical activities in BSN. The sensor nodes in BSN are measuring different health parameters. The clock of each sensor node in BSN must be synchronized to real clock i.e. clock of medical server. Time synchronization [4], [5], [6] is also important to ensure accurate coordination and minimize energy consumption. The sensors nodes are distributed on the body measure time using local clocks and have different sample frequencies [5]. The lifetime of the BSN platforms is depends on by very small batteries of each sensor node that comply with users comfort. The advancement in battery is very slow as compared to sensor nodes. As battery decay may show different time as compared to real (actual) time. Local time readings of sensors nodes can easily mismatch with other sensor nodes and the medical server clock because of random phase shifts and drift rates of clock oscillators. The error will be cumulate as the sensors operate for long periods and thus sensor node clocks will lose synchronization. Time synchronization process may suffer from external attack, internal attack or both. External attacks are those in which an (external) attacker manipulates the communicating signals between pairs of nodes and causes the nodes to desynchronize, or to remain unsynchronized even after a successful run of the synchronization protocol. Fig. 3 shows the WBSN along with medical server taken into consideration. The medical server sends a synchronization signal after a regular time interval to a trusted node in WBSN.

In the given paper, sender-receiver based protocol for time synchronization in BSN is proposed. In sender-receiver based approach all receivers should be synchronize with designated sender. Sender-receiver approach basically includes three steps [7]. i. The sender node periodically broadcasts a message with its local time as a timestamp to all intended receivers. Corresponding to message the receiver reply back to sender. ii. The message delay between the sender and receiver is calculated by measuring the total round-trip time (RTT) from the time a receiver requests a timestamp until the time it actually receives a response. iii. If delay is less than RTT, all receivers then synchronize with the sender using the timestamp they receive from the sender. The sender-receiver protocol suffers from external attacker. The greater RTT than expected shows there is an external attacker has captured the packet and then replaying [5] it again. For example, if at time T1, Sensor node S sends a sy nchronization packet to receiver node R. Node R receives this packet at T2, where T2 =T1+d+. Here, and d represent the offset between the two nodes and end-to-end delay respectively. At time T3, sensor node R replies back to sender node S an acknowledgement packet. This packet contains the values of T2 and T3. Node S receives the packet at T4. Similarly, T4 is related to T3 as T4 = T3+d-. Node S can calculate the clock offset and the end-to-end delay as: Offset () = ((T2 T1) (T4 T3))/2 Delay (d) = ((T2 T1) + (T4 T3))/2 (1) (2)

Figure 4: Replay attack by external attacker IJRCEE@2013 http://www.ijrcee.org

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If an external attacker [5] performs pulse-delay attack, the equations will change to: T2*=T1++d+ and T4*=T3-+d+. Here is the pulse-delay introduced by the attacker [3]. In presence of pulse delay clock offset and the end-to-end delay will be Offset () = ((T2 T1) (T4 T3) + )/2 Delay (d) = ((T2 T1) + (T4 T3) + )/2 (3) (4)

4 PROPOSED PROTOCOL FOR BSN

In this section a protocol for secure time synchronization for BSN in tier-1 architecture of WBSN is proposed. The protocol will synchronize the local clocks of all sensor nodes to trusted node participated in BSN. Let us assume that group membership is known to trusted node and also all nodes reside in the power range of trusted node in WBSN. Let us consider MS is a Medical Server, which is responsible for initialization of time synchronization signals, sends the synchronization packet to Trusted Node (TN) in BSN as shown in tier-2 and tier-3 communication architecture [3] of Fig 2. The MS always sends the synchronization message to TN. The sending time of the challenge packet from MS is TMS and receiving time of challenge packet at TN is TTN. After receiving the challenge packet the TN will reply back to MS via sending response packet to MS. At MS will calculate delay (d) occurs. If calculated delay (d) at MS is less than expected maximal delay (d*) then MS assumes that it receives time synchronization packet without replay attack [5]. Otherwise, MS will again send the challenge packet to trusted node until calculated delay is than or equal to maximal delay. Let us consider TN is a trusted and non-malicious sensor node. The sending time of the challenge packet by node TN is represented by Ti (time measured by node TN) and receiving time of packet by any other sensor node (all remaining nodes participating in BSN except TN) in BSN is TN is Tj. The TN and TN measured by two different clocks. Ti is measured by the local clock of node TN (i.e. CTN) whereas Tj is measured by the local clock of node TN (i.e. CTN). The offset (or the difference between the local clocks) between the two nodes is represented by ij (calculated by node TN with respect to node TN). The delay for the packet transfer from TN to TN is represented by dij. The proposed protocol in tier-1 architecture is explained in following steps: Step 1: Trusted Node (TN) broadcasts challenge packets containing its node identifier (TN), time at the TN node clock (CTN) and challenge nonce (Ns) toall sensor nodes participating in the WBSN. If there are n nodes in the group then in the first step the number of messages transmitted is n-1 (because nth node is TN). In proposed protocol the TN is taken as sender node. Step 2: In this step of the protocol, every node TN (other than

TN), which have received the challenge packet acknowledges back to sender node TN, known as response packet [8]. This packet contains triples {Tj, Ns, TN}, where Tj is the receipt time of the challenge packet from node TN, Ns is nonce sent by TN and TN is node-id of sender respectively. It also contains Message Authentication Code (MAC) [9], [10], which enables TN to authenticate the packet sent by TN in this step. The response packet also includes the sending time (Tj) from node TN. MAC is used to provide resiliency against external attacker. So in this step n-1 MACs are calculated one for each pair of TN and TN and then each TN sends messages to TN. A pair wise secret key (Kij) which is shared between nodes TN and TN is also used in the response messages. Step 3: On receiving the response packet the sensor node TN calculates the delay occurred (d), corresponding to challenge response and if all the calculated delays for each node are less than a maximal delay (d*: It is maximum delay in Round Trip Time (RTT)) then node TN calculates the offset for each node TN. If any nodes calculated delay is more than maximal delay then TN assumes that response from TN is suffers from external attacker and dont synchronization signal to that TN.

4.1 PROPOSED PROTOCOL TION IN BSN:

FOR

TIME SYNCHRONIZA-

The proposed protocol is discussed as follows: 1. Broadcasting of challenge packet to all nodes in the group denoted by TN. 2. TN (Ti) TN(Tj): TN, CTN, Ns; for all j=1, ....,n-1. /* Node TN sends a challenge packet for synchronization, containing its node-id TN, Clock time of TN i.e. CTN, and nonce Ns at time Ti to all nodes in the group and node TN receive the packet at time Tj */ 3. Reply from all TN sensor node to TN TN (Tj) TN (Ti) : TN, Tj, m, M, ACK m = {Tj, Ns, TN } M = {MAC{ Kij}[TN, Tj, Tj, Ns, TN, ACK]} /* Node TN neighboring node of TN will send response packet to TN at time Tj. The packet also contains receiving time of challenge packet at TN i.e. Tj from node TN with nonce Ns. */ 4. Compute d for each pair of TN and TN.

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[5]

/* calculate end-to-end delay and offset set between each sensor node from trusted node. */ dij = [(TjTi)+(TiTj)]/2, for all j=1,..,n-1 if all dij d* then ij=[(TjTi)(Ti-Tj)]/2, for all j=1,...,n-1 if (ij=0) then TN is already synchronized with clock time of TN i.e. CTN. else send the synchronization packet to TN from TN as in step1 end if else Node TN is Malicious (external attacker) then Repeat step 1 to 3 again. end if

Ajay Agarwal, Arun Kumar Tripathi, An Approach towards Time Synchroni zation Based Secure Protocol for Wireless Sensor Network, Networked Digital Technologies, Communications in Computer and Information Science Volume 88, 2010, pp 321-332. [6] Capkun S., Ganeriwal S., Popper C., Srivastava, M.B., Secure Time Synchroni zation in Sensor Networks, ACM Transactions on Information and System Security, 2008. Article No: 23, 11(4). [7] M. Manzo, S. Sastry, T. Roosta Time synchronization in networks, in Pro ceedings of the 3rd ACM Workshop on Security of Ad Hoc and Sensor Net works (SASN 05), pp. 107116, November 2005. [8] D. Sanchez, H. Baldus, A deterministic pairwise key pre-distribution scheme for mobile sensor networks, in Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Security and Privacy for Emerging Areas in Communications Networks (SecureComm 05), pp. 277288. [9] C. Wang , K. Sun, P. Ning, Secure and resilient clock synchronization in wireless sensor networks, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, vol. 24, no. 2, pp. 395408,2006. [10] Chen, K., Li, H., Wen, M., Zheng Y., A Secure Time Synchronization Protocol for Sensor Network, Emerging Technologies in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Lecture Notes in Computer Science Volume 4819, 2007, pp 515-526.

Authors Biography
J. S. Lather (: jslather@nitkkr.ac.in) received B.E. in Electrical Engineering from REC Surat and M.Tech. and PhD in Control Systems from REC Kurukshetra (presently NIT Kurukshetra). His research interests are Robust Control, Wireless Sensor Networks, Control of time delay systems etc.

5 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK

The WBSNs suffers from challenges such as limited battery power, memory limitation, limited computational capability, cost and the physical size of the sensor nodes. The time synchronization in WBSN is a critical activity. In this paper, the secure time synchronization process in WBSN is in Tier -1 architecture is proposed. The proposed protocol removes the chance of external attacks in time synchronization in BSN. In this protocol, it is assume that transfer of time synchronization packet from medical server to trusted node is secure. In future the communication between medical server and trusted node i.e. tier-3 architecture to tier -1 architecture may implement with the help of Message Authentication Code (MAC) for secure time synchronization. The proposed protocol can detect only external attackers but not internal attackers. In future the internal attacker can be identified.

REFERENCES
[1] [2] [3] Ghosal D., Mukherjee, B., Yick, J. Wireless sensor network survey, Computer Network, 2008, 52(12), 22922330. Friedemann Mattern, Kay Romer, The design space of wireless sensor net works, IEEE Wireless communications, 2004, vol. 11, no. 6, pp. 54 61. Athanasios Vasilakos, Huasong Cao, Min Chen, Sergio Gonzalez, M. Leung , Victor C., Body Area Networks: A Survey, Mobile Networks and Applica tions, April 2011, Volume 16, Issue 2, pp 171-193. G. Cao, H. Song, S. Zhu Attack-resilient time synchronization for wireless sensor networks, in Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad-Hoc and Sensor Systems (MASS 05), pp. 765772. IJRCEE@2013 http://www.ijrcee.org

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