Demonstrating a lightweight data provenance for sensor networks

Abstract

The popularity of sensor networks and their many uses in critical domains such as military and healthcare make them more vulnerable to malicious attacks. In such contexts, trustworthiness of sensor data and their provenance is critical for decision-making. In this demonstration, we present an efficient and secure approach for transmitting provenance information about sensor data. Our provenance approach uses light-weight in-packet Bloom filters that are encoded as sensor data travels through intermediate sensor nodes, and are decoded and verified at the base station. Our provenance technique is also able to defend against malicious attacks such as packet dropping and allows one to detect the responsible node for packet drops. As such it makes possible to modify the transmission route to avoid nodes that could be compromised or malfunctioning. Our technique is designed to create a trustworthy environment for sensor nodes where only trusted data is processed.