Secured Domain of Sensor Nodes - A New Concept.

For the procedures of creating situational awareness an important element is the freshness (timeliness) of data and the credibility of information sources. A modern and rich source of such data may be sensor networks, but their use as a reliable source of data is a major challenge mainly because the sensor nodes in the network are usually mobile, use wireless links, have a small computing power and have small energy resources. The paper presents a new concept of a secure sensor nodes domain, which is a very reliable source of sensor data. The data transferred inside the domain are protected by cryptography, cryptographic material stored in the resources of sensor nodes is also protected by cryptography, and data obtained from sensor nodes from the place of their acquisition to the sink node are protected. Trusted Platform Module (TPM) is used to support the process of securing the data in the domain. In the second part of the paper developed a secured domain demonstrator for sensor nodes is described, which illustrates the functioning of the key elements of the concept presented.