SOS: Secure Overlay Sensornets

Overlay networks (ONs) are logical networks built on top of a physical network with the aim of moving part of the routing complexity to the application layer. At the same time, sensornets are ad hoc networks comprised mainly of small sensor nodes with extremely limited resources which can be used to monitor areas of interest. In this paper, we present secure overlay sensornets (SOS). SOS builds an ON over a sensornet, and it establishes and monitors alternative overlay routes. By doing so, SOS is able to find out routes more secure than routes provided by the default routing protocol. Our results indicate that SOS improves the delivery ratio in scenarios under DoS attacks and that it is efficient in terms of energy consumption. To our knowledge, SOS is the first security mechanism based on ONs for sensornets