Secure transfer of environmental data to enhance human decision accuracy

A critical issue in environmental decision making is how to trust the monitoring information gathered by a multitude of devices at remote locations. The accuracy of information helps in enhancing the effectiveness of decisions, whether it is made by human beings or by an intelligent system. The researchers and practitioners from disciplines such as climatology, agriculture, and meteorology, which depend on the environmental data, are heavily affected in the case of inaccurate information. In order to deal with the above problem, in this paper a data encryption algorithm inspired by the blood brain barrier (BBB) system. A real scenario to irrigate a remote location based on a wireless sensor network (WSN) is simulated in network simulator 2 (ns-2) to study the performance of the encryption algorithm. Our result and analysis show that the proposed encryption mechanism can efficiently protect the data communication from brute-force search or exhaustive key search, eavesdropping, spoofed, altered or replayed routing information, selective forwarding, acknowledgement spoofing, sybil and hello flood attacks. Hence, the proposed data encryption algorithm ensures the confidentiality of critical information from source to a given destination, which ultimately helps in enhancing the human decision accuracy and learning environmental conditions.