A witness-based approach for data fusion assurance in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Abstract-In wireless sensor networks, sensor nodes are spread randomly over the coverage area to collect information of interest. Data fusion is used to process these collected information before they are sent to the base station, the observer of the sensor network. We study the security of the data fusion process in this work. In particular, we propose a witness-based solution to assure the validation of the data sent from data fusion nodes to the base station. We also present the theoretical analysis for the overhead associated with the mechanism, which indicates that even in an extremely harsh environment the overhead is low for the proposed mechanism.Index Terms-wireless ad hoc networks, sensor networks, data fusion, information assurance, network security.I. INTRODUCTION Recent advances in electronic and computer technologies have paved the way for the proliferation of ubiquitous wireless networks. Fast deployment of communication networks is highly desirable under many situations, such as establishing efficient, survivable dynamic communications for emergency and rescue operations. Wireless ad hoc networks can be formed almost instantly by deploying a number of nodes. The formation of ad hoc networks does not require the use of any preexisting infrastructure. Applications of such networks range from battlefield communication networks to environment monitoring sensor networks.A special type of ad hoc networks is a wireless sensor network. Contrary to more traditional computer networks, wireless sensor networks (WSN) consist of a large number of ultra-small autonomous devices. Each device, called a sensor node, is battery powered and equipped with integrated sensors, data processing capabilities, and short-range radio communications. In typical application scenarios, the nodes are spread randomly over the terrain under scrutiny and collect sensor data. Each node processes the data and coordinates with nearby nodes to combine their information (the process is called data fusion). The aggregate data is then forwarded to specialized gateway nodes or base stations. Examples of WSN projects include SmartDust [1] and WINS [2].

On the Security of Wireless Sensor Networks

“…using a Merkle hash tree), which will be used in a negotiation with the base station to demonstrate the authenticity of the data used to construct the report. Other approaches [27] take advantage of the density of sensor networks by using the nodes in the neighborhood of the aggregator as witnesses. Finally, it is also possible to filter the packets containing the report and the proofs in their way to the base station, hence decreasing the amount of traffic created by false aggregations (e.g.…”

Efficient and Optimally Secure In-Network Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks

“…The simplest approach is a single-aggregator model [7][8][9][10] where each node sends its sensor reading directly to the aggregator (e.g., base station), and then the aggregator computes the final aggregation result. However, these protocols suffer from having a single node with high congestion.…”

Secure and highly-available aggregation queries in large-scale sensor networks via set sampling

“…As a result, we choose to substantially depart from most existing approaches [1,2,6,10,14,15,18,27], which typically try to fix the security holes in in-network aggregation. We propose a novel tree sampling protocol that directly uses randomized sampling to answer aggregation queries.…”

“…The second attack can be much more serious since even a single malicious sensor can completely corrupt the final result. Thus the need to make aggregation queries secure against the second attack has been widely acknowledged [1,2,6,10,14,15,18,26,27].…”

“…Most pioneering efforts [1,6,14,15,18] on secure aggregation queries make strong restrictive assumptions (e.g., assuming a single malicious sensor [14,15] or assuming single-level aggregation [1,6,18]). Hierarchical secure aggregation [2,10] is one of the first protocols that make general aggregation queries secure with provable guarantees.…”