Concealed Integrity Monitoring for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Nowadays, sensor networks are widely installed around the world. Typical sensors provide data for healthcare, energy management, environmental monitoring, etc. In the future sensors will become a part of critical infrastructures. In such a scenario the network operator has to monitor the integrity of the network devices, otherwise the trustworthiness of the whole system is questionable. The problem is that every integrity protocol needs a secure channel between the devices. Therefore, we will introduce a covert channel for hidden transportation of integrity monitoring messages. The covert channel enables us to hide integrity check messages embedded into regular traffic without giving potential attackers a hint on the used integrity protocol.