Regenerating Code based Secure Distributed Storage for Wireless Sensor Networks

In certain wireless sensor network (WSN) scenarios the data fragments should be stored in a number of sensor nodes, and for the self-sustaining purposes, the storage should possess the ability to repair the lost fragment and to protect data secrecy. For achieving the above goals, we propose employment of the regenerating codes and symmetric-key encryption with a Blom based key management. Particularly note that the encoded blocks stored in the i-th node and originating from the j-th node are encrypted by symmetric key Kg. A common and desirable feature regarding the considered regenerating codes and Blom's key management scheme is that the both are based on employment of Vandermonde matrix, and accordingly yield a unified implementation framework. Preliminary consideration of the implementation complexity of the proposed scheme implies that the energy costs in the both cases, regarding the scenarios with and without the faults, arc lower in comparison with related WSN schemes and accordingly suitable for applications related to resources-constrained WSNs. Resource consumption evaluations show the feasibility of the proposed scheme for WSNs. To our best knowledge, this paper is the first to realize the distributed storage with repair capability. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.