Abstract: In recent years, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been a very popular research topic which helps in networking, hardware, security and application-related problems. In this paper we focus on Mobile Unattended Wireless Sensor Networks (MUWSNs), nodes sense the environment and store the acquired data until the arrival of a trusted data sink. In this paper, we address the fundamental issue of quantifying to which extent secret sharing schemes, combined with nodes mobility, can help in assuring data availability and confidentiality. Secret sharing and node mobility can help in assuring data security using local communications only, and understanding how to set system parameters to achieve the desired trade-off between confidentiality and availability. We provide accurate analytical results binding the fraction of the network accessed by the sink and the adversary to the amount of information they can successfully recover. Extensive simulations support our findings.

Keywords: Mobile Unattended Wireless Sensor Networks (MUWSNs); Unattended Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSN); privacy, metrics, mobility models.