LDSCD: A loss and DoS resistant secure code dissemination algorithm supporting multiple authorized tenants

Abstract

Code dissemination protocol faces lots of threats from both the external and potentially internal attackers. Security thus becomes a critical requirement for code dissemination protocols in the wireless sensor networks (WSNs). This paper proposes a loss and denial of service (DoS) resistant secure code dissemination algorithm that supports multiple authorized tenants, referred in this work as a loss and DoS resistant secure code dissemination (LDSCD) for WSNs. In LDSCD, a social role-based distributed online code dissemination framework is proposed. In the proposed framework, the owner of WSNs is not directly involved in the code dissemination and a conditional proxy re-signature technique is utilized to authorize different tenants. The algorithm also proposes a detailed conditional proxy re-signature scheme for the online code dissemination with a security proof. Furthermore, a novel immediate packet authentication algorithm with loss-resilient consideration is also presented in this work to resist the DoS attacks exploiting the authentication delay. The experimental results show that the proposed LDSCD securely disseminates the Program Image to all nodes in the WSNs with acceptable latency and message cost. Furthermore, the experimental results also demonstrate that the proposed LDSCD outperforms the existing code dissemination algorithms in terms of dissemination cost and latency.