Secure and efficient dynamic program update in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Dynamic program update protocols provide a convenient way to reprogram sensor nodes after deployment. However, designing a secure program update protocol for wireless sensor networks is a difficult task because wireless networks are susceptible to attacks and nodes have limited resources. Recently, two secure program update protocols using orthogonality principle have been found to be vulnerable to two impersonation attacks, although these attacks are rather restrictive. This paper reports one new attack that is more general and makes the program update protocols even more vulnerable. With this attack, an attacker can easily impersonate the base station to install his/her preferred program on sensor nodes and then obtain control over the network. As a remedy, two simple countermeasures are suggested to defend against all these attacks. Finally, the security properties of the two proposed solutions are formally validated by a model checking tool.

Robust Distributed Reprogramming Protocol of Wireless Sensor Networks for Healthcare Systems

“…However, we find that Shim's proposed improved protocol is unworkable because the signature verification does not hold true. Among various secure protocols in WSNs [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24], most of the published reprogramming protocols [3, 6, 12-14, 16, 18, 20-23] are based on the centralized approach, which assumes the existence of a base station, and only the base station has the authority to reprogram sensor nodes. The centralized approach is not reliable in reality because of inefficiency, weak scalability, and vulnerability to potential attacks along the communication path [24].…”

“…Zeng et al further proposed an improved scheme, but Wang et al [5] pointed out that Zeng et al's proposed protocol [4] still suffers from an impersonation attack. In 2012, He et al [6] showed that an adversary can impersonate a base station to install his/her preferred program on sensor nodes in a WSN, and further, the adversary can control the whole WSN. He et al proposed two simple countermeasures which are formally validated by model checking.…”