Ph.D. Preliminary Exam - Nalin Subramanian

Date: 18 Nov, 2009
Time: 10:30 AM
Location: 223 Atanasoff Hall
Topic: Towards Secure and Reliable Data Management in Sensor Network
Major Professor(s): Wensheng Zhang


Abstract:

Wireless Sensor networks (WSNs), primitively driven by military and defense applications, are becoming integral part of civilian applications to meliorate the quality of life. Taking advantage of sensor network, people gain sophisticated knowledge of physical and social systems around them. Continuous sensing generates data which characterizes the sensing environment. Core objective of WSN is to enable secure storage and authorized access of the data gathered from the sensors. In other words, the essential functions of WSN includes, but not limited to, collecting raw sensory data about the sensing environment, storing the sensory data safely, authorizing data access to users, and helping users to capture the major feature or changes of the sensing systems.

Sensor nodes are usually deployed in unattended or/and hostile environments. Due to the lack of its tamper resistance, WSN is liable to various security threats and attacks. These impose considerable challenges for secure data management in sensor network. As more and more applications of WSNs collect sensitive information of peoples everyday life, privacy and security concerns draw more and more attention. Despite of solutions proposed in literature against several attacks, there exist considerable limitations restricting WSN from achieving its core mission. Those limitations comprehend high network overhead, lack of balance between system overhead, privacy and security level, lack of integrated solution to achieve several privacy and security properties, and reduced level of network reliability.

If the confidentiality of the sensory content is not preserved, the WSN becomes liable to leakage of sensitive information. If privacy of query is not preserved, it is not feasible to deploy the WSNs for managing user privacy. If integrity of the collected sensory information is not protected, no queriers or users can trust and/or use the collected information. If network reliability/robustness is not maintained, the WSN becomes vulnerable for denial of service quite often. Hence, four important issues should be addressed before wireless sensor network systems can realize their promise in civilian applications: (1) protect data confidentiality, so the sensitive information is secure; (2) protect data and query privacy, so the user privacy is maintained; (3) enforce integrity, so users can trust the collected information; (4) provide robust system and better network reliability, so the network is reliable and robust against denial of service attacks. This proposal explores privacy, confidentiality, integrity and reliability of sensor data management in wireless sensor networks.

To address confidentiality of individual sensory data, privacy of user query, integrity of sensory data, and reliability of the network simultaneously are very challenging. It becomes hard to achieve the synergy of confidentiality, privacy, and integrity because confidentiality or privacy-preserving schemes try to hide or interfere with data/query, while integrity protection usually needs to enable peer monitoring or public access of the data. Therefore, confidentiality, privacy, and integrity can be the conflicting requirements that one may barricade the implementation of the other. To show the efficacy and efficiency of the proposed schemes, I present simulation and experimental results of our schemes and compare their performances.