SurvSec: A New Security Architecture for Reliable Network Recovery from Base Station Failure of Surveillance WSN

Abstract Securing surveillance wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in hostile environments such as borders, perimeters and battlefields during Base Station (BS) failure is challenging. Surveillance WSNs are highly vulnerable to BS failure. The attackers can render the network useless by only destroying the BS as the needed efforts to destroy the BS is much less than that is needed to destroy the network. This attack scenario will give the attackers the best chance to compromise many legitimate nodes. Previous works have tackled BS failure by deploying a mobile BS or by using multiple BSs. Despite the best electronic countermeasures, intrusion tolerance and anti-traffic analysis strategies to protect the BSs, an adversary still can destroy them. This paper proposes a novel security architecture called Surveillance Security (SurvSec) for reliable network recovery from single BS failure of surveillance WSN with single BS. SurvSec relies on a set of sensor nodes serve as Security Managers for management and storage of the security related data of all sensor nodes. SurvSec security architecture provides methodologies for choosing and changing the security managers of the surveillance WSN. SurvSec has three components: (1) Sensor nodes serve as Security Managers, (2) Data Storage System, (3) Data Recovery System. Furthermore, both the frame format of the stored data is carefully built and the security threats are encoded to allow minimum overheads for SurvSec security architecture. In this paper, we provide detailed specifications of SurvSec security architecture. We evaluate our designed security architecture for reliable network recovery from BS failure. Our evaluation shows that the proposed new security architecture can meet all the desired specifications and our analysis shows that the provided Security Managers are capable of network recovery from BS failure.