Implementation of data survival in unattended Wireless Sensor Networks using cryptography

Security in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is highly dependent on the behavior of the base station. This happens because, if the network is left unattended, sensor nodes cannot offload data to the (secure) base station in real time and, thus, until the base station becomes available, adversaries can compromise some sensor nodes and selectively destroy data. In order to prevent such attacks, providing the so-called “data survival”, some strategies can be employed. In this paper, we discuss and analyze different data survival strategies using cryptography. To the best of our knowledge, we provide the first implementation of such techniques, using a real sensor platform for their evaluation. As a result, we show that the main costs for the data survival process are not as high as it could be expected, and that strategies based on private keys can be used even if one considers the highly resource constrained nature of sensors.