Secure, dependable and publicly verifiable distributed data storage in unattended wireless sensor networks

In unattended wireless sensor networks (UWSNs), sensed data are stored locally or at designated nodes and further accessed by authorized collectors on demand. This paradigm is motivated by certain scenarios where historical or digest data (e.g., average temperature in a day), instead of real-time data, are of interest. The data are not instantly forwarded to a central sink upon sensing, thereby saving communication energy for transmission. Such a paradigm can also improve data survivability by making use of distributed data storage in cheap flash memory on nodes. However, the security and dependability of such data storage are critical for the future data accessibility in UWSNs. To address this issue, we propose a secure and dependable distributed storage scheme for UWSNs. Our scheme takes advantages of both secret sharing and Reed-Solomon code, which can achieve computational security and maintain low communication overhead in terms of shortened data dispersing size. We also propose a general coding method to publicly verify data integrity in a distributed manner, with low communication and storage overhead, and without the need of holding original data. The extensive analysis justifies that our scheme can provide secure, dependable and publicly verifiable distributed data storage in UWSNs even in the presence of node compromise and Byzantine failure. © 2010 Science China Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg