Application of IEEE 802.15.4 security procedures in OpenWSN protocol stack

With the diffusion of the Internet of Things paradigm, even more researchers and industries worldwide are focusing their attention on the definition of optimized protocol architectures, able to offer a wide range of services in Lowpower and Lossy Networks. In this context, the OpenWSN project emerges as one of the most promising open-source protocol stack for IoT devices; it is based on the IEEE 802.15.4 radio and is particularly suitable for constrained devices. Unfortunately, at the time of this writing, it does not support security features defined by IEEE 802.15.4 specifications for the MAC layer. To bridge this gap, we present in this contribution a freeware and opensource implementation of security procedures for the OpenWSN protocol suite, which embraces security attributes stored into the MAC entity, security functions operating at the MAC layer, and cryptographic techniques used to execute encryption and decryption functionalities. To provide a further insight, we also evaluated, through real experiments conducted with the TelosB hardware platform, the impact that the adoption of security features has on both computational load and communication latencies. Our findings demonstrate that computational capabilities of constrained motes drastically influence the network operation, thus requiring the design of optimized and enhanced security services. We believe that the open source nature of the developed module could widely support all people involved in this research area.