Papadimitratos, PanagiotisLuo, JunHubaux, Jean-Pierre2011-12-162011-12-162011-12-16201010.1109/JSAC.2010.100908https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/75067WOS:000283181200008Due to their limited capabilities, wireless sensor nodes are subject to physical attacks that are hard to defend against. In this paper, we first identify a typical attacker, called parasitic adversary, who seeks to exploit sensor networks by obtaining measurements in an unauthorized way. As a countermeasure, we first employ a randomized key refreshing: with low communication cost, it aims at confining (but not eliminating) the effects of the adversary. Moreover, our low-complexity solution, GossiCrypt, leverages on the large scale of sensor networks to protect data confidentiality, efficiently and effectively. GossiCrypt applies symmetric key encryption to data at their source nodes; and it applies re-encryption at a randomly chosen subset of nodes en route to the sink. The combination of randomized key refreshing and GossiCrypt protects data confidentiality with a probability of almost 1; we show this analytically and with simulations. In addition, the energy consumption of GossiCrypt is lower than a public-key based solution by several orders of magnitude.ConfidentialitySecurityProbabilistic Key Refreshing and En-route EncryptionGossiCrypttext::journal::journal article::research article