Secure Data Management in Reactive Sensor Networks

A wireless sensor network (WSN), an ad hoc network of resource constrained sensor nodes, has become an attractive option for monitoring applications. The wide use of sensor networks is due to the cheap hardware and detailed information they provide to the end user. As with every network of every computing device, security is one of the key issue of sensor networks. The resource constrained nature of sensor nodes make the security quite challenging. The sensor networks are prone to many kinds of security attack viz. report fabrication attack, denial of service attack, Sybil attack, traffic analysis attack, node replication attack, physical attack etc. The report fabrication attack is a security attack in which the adversary tries to generate bogus reports by compromising the sensor nodes. This paper proposes a security solution that makes cluster based sensor networks resilient to report fabrication attacks. The proposed solution relies on symmetric key mechanisms, appropriate for random deployment and also handles the node failures.