Secure Cooperative Data Storage and Query Processing in Unattended Tiered Sensor Networks

We consider an unattended tiered sensor network (UTSN) consisting of resource-rich master nodes at the upper tier and resource-poor sensor nodes at the lower tier. Sensor nodes submit data to nearby master nodes which store the data and answer the queries from the network owner on behalf of sensor nodes. Such a cooperative data storage and query processing paradigm offers a number of advantages over traditional Homogeneous unattended sensor networks. Relying on master nodes for data storage and query processing, however, raises severe concerns about data confidentiality and query-result correctness when the sensor network is deployed in hostile environments. In particular, a compromised master node may leak hosted sensitive data to the adversary; it may also return juggled or incomplete query results to the network owner. In this paper, we take multidimensional range queries as an example to investigate secure cooperative data storage and query processing in UTSNs. We present a suite of novel schemes that can ensure data confidentiality against master nodes and also enable the network owner to verify with very high probability the authenticity and completeness of any query result by inspecting the spatial and temporal relationships among the returned data. Detailed performance evaluations confirm the high efficacy and efficiency of the proposed schemes.