Title: Security assessments of IEEE 802.15.4 standard based on X.805 framework

Authors: Afolabi O. Richard, Aftab Ahmad, Kim Kiseon

Addresses: Department of Information and Communications, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST), 261, Oryong-dong, Buk-gu, Gwangju 500-712, Republic of Korea. ' Department of Computer Science, Norfolk State University, Norfolk, VA 23504, USA. ' Department of Information and Communications, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST), 261, Oryong-dong, Buk-gu, Gwangju 500-712, Republic of Korea

Abstract: One such wireless technology used to deploy sensitive network services requiring low rate communication, short distance application with low power consumption is the IEEE802.15.4 Low-Rate Wireless Personal Area Networks (LR-WPAN). These network services have stringent security requirements and, irrespective of the scale of deployment, the network should be secure enough to protect users, infrastructure, network services and applications. In this paper, we focus on the security mechanisms defined in the standard; evaluating it in the light of the ITU-T recommendation X.805 security architecture for end-to-end communication. We identify and assess the security dimensions, planes and layers in IEEE802.15.4 LR-WPAN as defined in the X.805 framework.

Keywords: IEEE 802.15.4; WPAN security; X.805 security framework; security assessment; LR-WPAN security; wireless security; network security; wireless PANs; personal area networks.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSN.2010.032217

International Journal of Security and Networks, 2010 Vol.5 No.2/3, pp.188 - 197

Received: 29 Nov 2008
Accepted: 13 Jun 2009
Published online: 17 Mar 2010 *

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