Secure Fault Tolerance in Wireless Sensor Networks

Fault tolerance provides wireless sensor networks (WSN) with reliable collection and dissemination of data while preserving limited resources in sensor nodes, especially power energy. Although data redundancy achieves the goal of fault tolerance in the data-centered network infrastructure of WSNpsilas, it also incurs security concerns by making data available in multiple locations. More attention should be paid when WSNpsilas are deployed in hostile environments where sensor nodes are easy to be captured for deleterious use by an adversary. In this context, cryptographic keys are of low efficiency for protecting data not involved in communication. In this paper, we propose a secure fault tolerance scheme for WSNpsilas, which uses secret sharing to checkpoint the state of the sink over multiple nodes. Through security analysis, we show that our scheme enhances the resiliency against node capture in the presence of data redundancy.