Efficient fine-grained data access control in wireless sensor networks

Recent advances in distributed in-network data storage and access control have led to active research in efficient and robust data management in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Although numerous schemes have been proposed this far, most of them do not provide enough attention towards exploiting user hierarchy and sensor heterogeneity, which is quite a practical issue especially when deploying WSNs in missioncritical application scenarios. In this paper, we propose an efficient secret-key cryptography-based (SKC) fine-grained data access control scheme for securing both distributed data storage and retrieval. In our design, secret keying information for data encryption and decryption are constructed based on the scheme of Blundo et al. [1] with information-theoretic security. To further enhance the security strength, we then propose an efficient user revocation scheme based on the idea of blinded Merkle hash tree construction. Extensive performance analysis shows that the proposed schemes are very efficient and practical for WSNs. © 2009 IEEE.