Securing Distributed Data Storage and Retrieval in Sensor Networks

Sensor networks have been an attractive platform for pervasive computing and communication. Due to the lack of physical protection, however, sensor networks are vulnerable to attacks if deployed in hostile environments. When a sensor network is under attack, the most fundamental concern is that information communicated or stored in the network remains safe. The past research has focused on securing information in communication, but how to secure information in storage has been generally overlooked. Meanwhile, distributed data storage and retrieval have become popular for efficient data management in sensor networks, which renders the absence of schemes for securing stored information to be a more severe problem. Hence, we propose in this paper three schemes to deal with the problem. All the schemes have the following properties: (i) only authorized entities can access data stored in the sensor network; (ii) the schemes are resilient to a large number of sensor node compromises. The second and the third schemes do not involve any centralized entity except for a few initialization or renewal operations, and thus support secure, distributed data storage and retrieval. The third scheme further provides high scalability and flexibility, and hence is most suitable in real applications. The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed schemes have also been verified through extensive analysis and TOSSIM-based simulations