Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have been gaining popularity in recent years because of their potential to enable innovative applications in various fields. These fields include industrial, social, and regulatory applications, to name a few. If we extend a traditional sensor network to the Internet, WSNs that are dispersed and networked together can collaborate to accomplish many tasks that cannot be accomplished with a few powerful sensors or computers on a smaller network. With the gaining popularity of cloud services due to the pay per use policy of computation and data storage resources and easing of the burden of maintaining the service, using the cloud to integrate a WSN to the Internet has become viable.
The primary goal of this research is to investigate how to facilitate secure communication between a WSN and a cloud and to provide a secure policy for users to access such a service. We propose and develop an architecture and programming interface, named as Intortus, to enable this exploration. Intortus lets software programmers develop and deploy applications on WSN quickly by relieving the programmer from understanding and using the cloud provider API to access its data store, and writing embedded C code for sensors. There are many challenges enabling such a service that provides end to end secure communication, design constraints due to limitations in the services of cloud providers to mention a few. We discuss the issues and approach taken to build such an architecture and interface. This thesis also describes the functionality Intortus provides and how it can be further extended.