pDCS: Security and Privacy Support for Data-Centric Sensor Networks

The demand for efficient data dissemination/access techniques to find relevant data from within a sensor network has led to the development of data-centric sensor (DCS) networks, where the sensor data instead of sensor nodes are named based on attributes such as event type or geographic location. However, saving data inside a network also creates security problems due to the lack of tamper resistance of the sensor nodes and the unattended nature of the sensor network. For example, an attacker may simply locate and compromise the node storing the event of his interest. To address these security problems, we present pDCS, a privacy-enhanced DCS network which offers different levels of data privacy based on different cryptographic keys. pDCS also includes an efficient key management scheme to facilitate the management of multiple types of keys used in the system. In addition, we propose several query optimization techniques based on Euclidean Steiner tree and keyed bloom filter (KBF) to minimize the query overhead while preserving query privacy. Finally, detailed analysis and simulations show that the KBF scheme can significantly reduce the message overhead with the same level of query delay and maintain a very high level of query privacy.

1 Introduction

Sensor networks are envisioned to be extremely useful for a broad spectrum of emerging civil and military applications [1], such as remote surveillance, habitat monitoring, and collaborative target tracking. Sensor networks scale in size as time goes on, so does the amount of sensing data generated. The large volume of data coupled with the fact that the data are spread across the entire network creates a demand for efficient data dissemination/access techniques to find the relevant data from within the network. This demand has led to the development of Data-Centric Sensor (DCS) networks [2], [3], [4].