Trustworthily Forwarding Sensor Networks Information to the Internet

Abstract

The Internet is soon going to be extended with the information collected from sensor networks deployed in wild remote regions of the world. For example, sensors may be dispersed in the jungle and forward information about the sensed states of the natural ecosystem, such as, humidity, fire detection... However, it is still quite easy for attackers to disconnect the sensors network from the Internet. For example, the sensors usually forward their messages to a base station, the Internet gateway, in a hop-by-hop fashion because they are resource-constrained in terms of energy, the spending of energy dramatically increases with the range of transmission and the attackers may capture intermediate sensors and drop messages rather than forwarding them. In this paper we study how computational trust can be used to mitigate the issue of sinkhole attacks and evaluate our approach on top of the MIX protocol.