New adversary and new threats: security in unattended sensor networks

Abstract

Some wireless sensor networks preclude the constant presence of a centralized data collection point, that is, a sink. In such a disconnected or unattended setting, nodes must accumulate sensed data until it can be off loaded to an itinerant sink. Furthermore, if the operating environment is hostile, there is a very real danger of node and data compromise. The unattended nature of the network makes it an attractive target for attacks that aim to learn, erase, or modify potentially valuable data collected and held by sensors. We argue that adversarial models and defense techniques in prior WSN literature about security are unsuitable for the unattended WSN setting. We define a new adversarial model by taking into account special features of the UWSN environment. We show that in the presence of a powerful mobile adversary, securing data stored on unattended sensors presents interesting challenges and opens an exciting new line of research.