A delay-bounded event-monitoring and adversary-identification protocol in resource-constraint sensor networks

Abstract Event monitoring is a common application in wireless sensor networks. For event monitoring, a number of sensor nodes are deployed to monitor certain phenomenon. When an event is detected, the sensor nodes report it to a base station (BS), where a network operator can take appropriate action based on the event report. In this paper, we are interested in scenarios where the event must be reported within a time bound to the BS possibly over multiple hops. However, such event reports can be hampered by compromised nodes in the middle that drop, modify, or delay the event report. To defend against such an attack, we propose S em , a Secure Event Monitoring protocol against arbitrary malicious attacks by Byzantine adversary nodes. S em provides the following provable security guarantees. As long as the compromised nodes want to stay undetected, a legitimate sensor node can report an event to the BS within a bounded time. If the compromised nodes prevent the event from being reported to the BS within the bounded time, the BS can identify a pair of nodes that is guaranteSchool of Electrical and Computer Engineeringed to contain at least one compromised node. To the best of our knowledge, no prior work in the literature can provide such guarantees. S em is designed to use the minimum level of asymmetric cryptography during normal operation when there is no attack, and use cryptographic primitives more liberally when an attack is detected. This design has the advantage that the overall S em protocol is lightweight in terms of the computational resources and the network traffic required by the cryptographic operations. We also show an operational example of S em using TOSSIM simulations.