Posh: Proactive cooperative self-healing in unattended wireless sensor networks

Unattended Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) are composed of many small resource-constrained devices and operate autonomously, gathering data which is periodically collected by a visiting sink. Unattended mode of operation, deployment in hostile environments and value (or critical-ity) of collected data are some of the factors that complicate UWSN security. This paper makes two contributions. First, it explores a new threat model involving a mobile adversary who periodi-cally compromises and releases sensors aiming to maximize its advantage and overall knowledge of collected data. Sec-ond, it constructs a self-healing protocol that allows sensors to continuously and collectively recover from compromise. The proposed protocol is both effective and efficient, as sup-ported by analytical and simulation results.