Confidentiality and availability issues in mobile unattended wireless sensor networks

In Mobile Unattended Wireless Sensor Networks (MUWSNs), nodes sense the environment and store the acquired data until the arrival of a trusted data sink. MUWSNs, other than being a reference model for an increasing number of military and civilian applications, also capture a few important characteristics of emerging computing paradigms like Participatory Sensing (PS). In this paper, we start by identifying the main features and issues of MUWSNs, revising the related work in the area and highlighting their shortcomings. We then propose a new approach based on secret sharing and information diffusion to improve data integrity and confidentiality, and present experimental results confirming the effectiveness of this solution. The rationale is that information sharing among neighboring nodes, combined with nodes mobility, helps distributing the information into the network in a way that, at the same time, facilitates data recovering and is resilient to data loss or stealing. This is a first step towards the general objective of providing closed results about how secret sharing schemes and nodes mobility can help in assuring data security using local communications only, and understanding how to set system parameters to achieve the desired trade-off between confidentiality and availability.