Securing coding based distributed storage in wireless sensor networks

We address the problem of pollution attacks in coding based distributed storage systems proposed for wireless sensor networks. In a pollution attack, the adversary maliciously alters some of the stored encoded packets, which results in the incorrect decoding of a large part of the original data upon retrieval. We propose algorithms to detect and recover from such attacks. In contrast to existing approaches to solve this problem, our approach is not based on adding cryptographic checksums or signatures to the encoded packets. We believe that our proposed algorithms are suitable in practical systems.