Information attacks and security in wireless sensor networks of industrial SCADA systems

The effectiveness of automated process control systems (APCS) and supervisory control and data acquisition systems (SCADA) information security depends on the applied protection technologies of transport environment data transmission components. This article investigates the problems of detecting attacks in wireless sensor networks (WSN) of SCADA systems. As a result of analytical research the authors developed the detailed classification of external attacks and intrusion detection in sensor networks and brought a detailed description of attacking impacts on components of SCADA systems in accordance with the selected directions of attacks. The cryptographic encryption tasks in the wireless sensor networks have been resolved by means of the built-in mechanism for symmetric AES encryption with 128 bit keys according to the ZigBee Pro Feature Set specification. However, analysis of the current state in the field of security of wireless sensor networks has shown that the key management problem is almost no solved. The article considers the problems and objectives of key management for data encryption in wireless sensor networks (WSN) of SCADA systems. The structure of the key information in the ZigBee network and methods of keys obtaining are discussed. The use of a hybrid key management schemes is most suitable for WSN. The session symmetric key is used to encrypt the sensor data, asymmetric keys are used to encrypt the session key transmitted from the routing information. Three algorithms of hybrid key management using routing information frames determined by routing methods and the WSN topology are presented.