network, data is decrypted on receipt and re-encrypted for
forwarding. An attacker can thus gain access to all clear
text data that passes through a compromised node. Scalability
is often also an issue for these protocols because they
need to establish a secured connection with each of their
neighbors to form a mesh network, and cryptographic
overhead occurs on each hop. On the other hand, in an
end-to-end security protocol, cryptographic overhead occurs
on the sender and receiver only. Compromised nodes
provide an attacker with access to the measurement data
from local nodes only. Routing algorithms are also agnostic
of the payload protection, thus even nodes that have not
established a secure connection can be used to forward
packets to a subscriber/destination. One such scenario
could be in an office building shared by multiple occupants
(parties): each party subscribes to a part of the sensor
readings only and wishes to keep the data they subscribed
to private from other parties, yet they still may share a
common communication network to reduce cost.
However, an application layer security protocol does
not protect routing information. Adversaries can therefore
analyze the traffic patterns of a network in clear text. They
may even launch a DoS, worm hole, or resource consumption
attack that lowers the availability of the network [20].
In this paper, we focus on end-to-end communication
security, and rely on other schemes for securing lower
communication layers