Advanced Evasive Data Storage in Sensor Networks

In case the data which is stored and processed in a sensor network has some value, it needs to be protected from unauthorized access through a security mechanism. The idea of evasive data storage is that data moves around the sensor network instead of remaining at a fixed location. In this way, an adversary, who has once (through node capture) had access to the data stored at some particular node, must compromise more sensors in order to maintain his illegitimate access to the sensor data. We refine the previously published simple evasive data storage techniques in two ways: (1) we improve the efficiency of data retrieval by bounding the area in which data may move, (2) we introduce data splitting as a technique to protect against sleeper attacks in which the adversary simply takes over a subset of nodes and waits for valuable data to pass by. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach using extensive simulations.