A lightweight secure scheme for detecting provenance forgery and packet dropattacks in wireless sensor networks

Large-scale sensor networks are deployed in numerous application domains, and the data they collect are used in decision-making for critical infrastructures. Data are streamed from multiple sources through intermediate processing nodes that aggregate information. A malicious adversary may introduce additional nodes in the network or compromise existing ones. Therefore, assuring high data trustworthiness is crucial for correct decision-making. Data provenance represents a key factor in evaluating the trustworthiness of sensor data. Provenance management for sensor networks introduces several challenging requirements, such as low energy and bandwidth consumption, efficient storage and secure transmission. In this paper, we propose a novel lightweight scheme to securely transmit provenance for sensor data. The proposed technique relies on in-packet Bloom filters to encode provenance. We introduce efficient mechanisms for provenance verification and reconstruction at the base station. In addition, we extend the secure provenance scheme with functionality to detect packet drop attacks staged by malicious data forwarding nodes. We evaluate the proposed technique both analytically and empirically, and the results prove the effectiveness and efficiency of the lightweight secure provenance scheme in detecting packet forgery and loss attacks.