Design and implementation of data survival in unattended wireless sensor networks

In Wireless Sensor Networks, the base station is generally the only unconditionally trusted entity. If it is not connected for a period of time, the network is left unattended and sensor nodes cannot offload data in real time. Thus, until the base station becomes available, adversaries can compromise some sensor nodes and selectively destroy data. In order to prevent such attacks, providing the so-called “data survival”, some strategies can be employed. In this paper, we propose a new strategy based on the concept of secure multi-party protocols. The main advantages of the proposed strategy are not limited to the security, since it (1) preserves privacy, (2) enables the use o data aggregation, (3) enforces a level of trust among nodes, which collaborate to compute functions. Additionally, we implement and evaluate the proposed solution using a real sensor platform. Results show the low cost of the scheme in terms of energy consumption and processing time.