Improving security in data-centric storage for wireless sensor networks

This paper proposes a novel mechanism to provide with security to existing Data-Centric Storage (DCS) solutions for Wireless Sensor Networks. The goal is to achieve a high security level without modifying standard DCS premises or increasing the network overhead. This means we just use the messages an operations already defined by DCS solutions. Our goal is to fulfil two security requirements: (i) only legitimate nodes for an application should be able to access the information of that application, and (ii) avoid long-term Denial of Service attacks targeting an application that operates in the network. Toward this end we define two different solutions depending on whether the sensor nodes in the network are resource-limited or powerful. We run extensive simulations and discuss the efficiency of the proposed solution under two different DCS solutions: GHT that proposes to use a single and static storage node per application, and STARR-DCS that uses multiple storage nodes per application that in addition change over the time. Based on the obtained results and discussion we conclude that changing replication nodes over the time is by itself a smart approach to avoid long-term attacks.The research leading to these results has been partially funded by the Spanish MEC under the CRAMNET project (TEC2012-38362-C03-01) and by the General Directorate of Universities and Research of the Regional Government of Madrid under the MEDIANET Project (S2009/TIC-1468), NSERC DIVA Network Program, Canada Research Chairs Program, the Ontario Research Fund (ORF), ORNEC, the Early Ontario Researcher Award, the Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE)