A confidential and DoS-resistant multi-hop code dissemination protocol for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Code dissemination protocols provide a convenient way to update program images via wireless communication. Due to the open environment in which Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are typically deployed, it is important that a code dissemination protocol ensures that a program image update can be authenticated as coming from a trusted source. In some applications it is also required that the data be kept confidential in spite of the possibility of message interception. Authentication and confidentiality are implemented through cryptographic operations which may be expensive in power consumption, making a protocol with these features vulnerable to attack by an adversary who transmits forged data, forcing nodes to waste energy in identifying it as invalid i.e., a signature-based DoS attack). Additionally, in multi-hop dissemination protocols, each sensor node is required to broadcast its program image when requested by its neighbors. An adversary could repeatedly send spurious program image requests to its neighbors, making them exhaust their energy reserves i.e., request-based DoS attack). In this paper, we present a new approach to achieve confidentiality in multi-hop code dissemination. We propose counter-measures against both types of DoS attacks mentioned above. To our knowledge, we are the first to integrate confidentiality and DoS-attack-resistance in a multi-hop code dissemination protocol. Our approach is based on Deluge, an open source, state-of-the-art code dissemination protocol for WSNs. In addition, We provide a performance evaluation in terms of latency and energy consumption in our scheme, compared with the original Deluge and the existing secure Deluge.