SER: Secure and efficient retrieval for anonymous range query in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

A two-tiered wireless sensor network, where storage nodes take charge of storing sensitive data and processing queries with respect to the sensing nodes and querists, incurs a security breach. This is because the important role of storage nodes may be (1) instructed by attackers to return fake and/or incomplete data in response to querists’ queries or (2) compromised by attackers to arbitrarily expose mass of valuable data or launch choice attacks to make authorized querists miss valuable data and disturb their decisions. Additionally, attackers may launch DoS attacks via wireless channels to storage nodes. To address the above issues, we propose a secure and efficient retrieval scheme for wireless sensor networks, namely SER, which mainly prevents attackers from gaining the valuable information stored on storage nodes, detects the compromised storage nodes when they misbehave, and efficiently verifies the querists’ privileges without knowing their identities. In addition to privacy and system analyses, we demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of SER through experiments conducted on TelosB prototype sensor platform equipped with IEEE 802.15.4 TI wireless transceiver, and conduct comparisons with state-of-the-art methods.