Self-healing in unattended wireless sensor networks
Abstract
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) appeal to a wide range of applications that involve the monitoring of various physical phenomena. However, WSNs are subject to many threats. In particular, lack of pervasive tamper-resistant hardware results in sensors being easy targets for compromise. Having compromised a sensor, the adversary learns all the sensor secrets, allowing it to later encrypt/decrypt or authenticate messages on behalf of that sensor. This threat is particularly relevant in the novel unattended wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) scenario. UWSNs operate without constant supervision by a trusted sink. UWSN’s unattended nature and increased exposure to attacks prompts the need for special techniques geared towards regaining security after being compromised. In this article, we investigate cooperative self-healing in UWSNs and propose various techniques to allow unattended sensors to recover security after compromise. Our techniques provide seamless healing rates even against a very agile and powerful adversary. The effectiveness and viability of our proposed techniques are assessed by thorough analysis and supported by simulation results. Finally, we introduce some real-world issues affecting UWSN deployment and provide some solutions for them as well as a few open problems calling for further investigation.
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BibTex
@article{pietro2012self-healing,
author = {Pietro, Roberto Di and Ma, Di and Soriente, Claudio and Tsudik, Gene},
title = {{Self-healing in unattended wireless sensor networks}},
booktitle = {ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks},
year = 2012,
month = nov,
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
doi = {10.1145/2379799.2379806},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/2379799.2379806}
}Research Collection: 20.500.11850/59097