Security in Wireless Sensor Networks: A formal verification of protocols

The increase of the digitalization taking place in various industrial domains is leading developers towards the design and implementation of more and more complex networked control systems (NCS) supported by Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). This naturally raises new challenges for the current WSN technology, namely in what concerns improved guarantees of technical aspects such as real-time communications together with safe and secure transmissions. Notably, in what concerns security aspects, several cryptographic protocols have been proposed. Since the design of these protocols is usually error-prone, security breaches can still be exposed and maliciously exploited unless they are rigorously analyzed and verified. In this paper we formally verify, using ProVerif, three cryptographic protocols used in WSN, regarding the security properties of secrecy and authenticity. The security analysis performed in this paper is more robust than the ones performed in related work. Our contributions involve analyzing protocols that were modeled considering an unbounded number of participants and actions, and also the use of a hierarchical system to classify the authenticity results. Our verification shows that the three analyzed protocols guarantee secrecy, but can only provide authenticity in specific scenarios.