Catch Me (If You Can): Data Survival in Unattended Sensor Networks

Abstract

Unattended sensor networks operating in hostile environments might collect data that represents a high-value target for the adversary. The unattended sensor's inability to off-load -in real time -sensitive data to a safe external entity makes it easy for the adversary to mount a focused attack aimed at eliminating certain target data. In order to facilitate survival of this data, sensors can collectively attempt to confuse the adversary by changing its location and content, i.e., by periodically moving the data around the network and encrypting it.In this paper, we focus on data survival in unattended sensor networks faced with an adversary intent on surgically destroying data which it considers to be of high value. After motivating the problem and considering several attack flavors, we propose several simple techniques and provide their detailed evaluation.

Secure, dependable and publicly verifiable distributed data storage in unattended wireless sensor networks

“…Following the previous works on distributed storage in WSNs (e.g. Unattended WSNs [2,7], Storage-Centric WSNs [3], Data Centric WSNs [9], In-Situ Data Storage WSNs [5], etc. ), we assume that each sensor node has certain capacity to store data.…”

“…In the former case, data are sensed, processed, aggregated and managed at a central location, usually a sink. In the latter case, after a sensor node has generated some data, the node stores the data locally or at some designated nodes within the network, instead of immediately forwarding the data to a centralized location out of the network [2][3][4]. Such a paradigm is called "Unattended WSNs" (UWSNs) [2].…”

“…In the latter case, after a sensor node has generated some data, the node stores the data locally or at some designated nodes within the network, instead of immediately forwarding the data to a centralized location out of the network [2][3][4]. Such a paradigm is called "Unattended WSNs" (UWSNs) [2]. UWSNs paradigm is motivated by scenarios whereby not real-time information, but digest information is of interest.…”

Secure and Efficient Data Storage in Unattended Wireless Sensor Networks

“…Most proposed security schemes, however, are based on assumption that a trusted party (sink or base station) is always available, leading to that unnormal actions of compromised sensors can be detected by the on-line sink [2]. However, in Unattended WSNs (UWSNs) [3], there is no static sink but a mobile sink periodically accesses the UWSN to collect data instead, and the sensor nodes store their sensed data locally or at some special designated nodes within the network till a mobile sink visit, instead of immediately forwarding the data to a centralized location out of the network.…”

“…In such a network, a mobile adversary [3] (we denote it as ADV hereafter), which behaves in UWSNs when the mobile sink is absent, can steal data stored in compromised sensors without modifying any sensed data, and interfering with communications of any sensors. In other words, the mobile adversary is read-only data during the mobile sink visiting interval, which is impossible to detect by the mobile sink.…”