Criptografia adaptativa em redes de sensores visuais sem fio

Abstract

Recently Wireless Sensor Networks have gained attention of researchers and industry around the world, such that many projects and solutions have been developed for various scenarios and applications. Such networks are formed by small sensor nodes with low processing power, few memory and few energy. Thus, resources are scarce, particularly energy, where, in most cases these nodes are powered by batteries, which is a crucial point in the network design. A kind of sensor network in which camera-enabled sensors are inserted are call Wireless Visual Sensor Networks. Because of this, these networks become able to recover large quantities of environment information which may to be interesting for several applications. However, in general, sensor networks are very vulnerable due to the nature of the communication and due also to the sensor nodes are, sometimes, in remote, hostile and hard to reach areas. Moreover, the sensor nodes are potentially inexpensive devices that can be easily purchased or designed by others to attack the network. So to mitigate these vulnerabilities, research in security area for such networks are required. However, traditional security mechanisms lead to very overhead of computing and communication can compromise the network performance when they are adopted. Thinking about it, this master's thesis aims to propose a new paradigm to ensure security for wireless visual sensor networks, being presented through a theoretical mathematical model to perform differentiation of areas in the monitoring environment to then considering the particularities of the application monitoring to provide security at different levels. Called Adaptive Encryption, this theoretical model can be used for various applications requiring different security assurances for different network locations, implying providing security at acceptable levels while consuming less network resources, above all energy.