Sluice: Secure Dissemination of Code Updates in Sensor Networks

Abstract

Network reprogramming allows for over-the-air application updates in sensor networks. We describe the operation of a number of network reprogramming protocols that have emerged for the TinyOS sensor network operating system. We go on to discuss potential security issues that arise from the operation of network reprogramming protocols.

Seluge: Secure and DoS-Resistant Code Dissemination in Wireless Sensor Networks

“…(In Deluge, such packets are used to advertise new data and facilitate the request and retransmission of packets.) Indeed, the approaches in [10,17] overlooked the authentication of such packets. As a result, the adversary can forge such packets and exploit the Deluge epidemic and suppression mechanisms to launch DoS attacks.…”

“…Several recent works have attempted to provide secure code dissemination for wireless sensor networks [8,10,17]. All these approaches are extensions to Deluge [13].…”

“…All these approaches are extensions to Deluge [13]. Lanigan et al proposed a protocol named Sluice [17] to integrate signature and cryptographic hash functions to provide efficient authentication for code dissemination. This approach follows Deluge to divide each code image into pages.…”

“…Though all existing approaches [8,10,17] are based on Deluge [13], none of them provide a satisfactory solution to the authentication of advertisement and Selective Negative Acknowledgment (SNACK) packets. (In Deluge, such packets are used to advertise new data and facilitate the request and retransmission of packets.)…”

SecMAS: Security Enhanced Monitoring and Analysis Systems for Wireless Sensor Networks

“…But the scheme is vulnerable to the malicious code injection attack. SLUICE [6] is then proposed to add the security guarantee Deluge. The code dissemination techniques enable management systems to flexibly update the remote sensor node configuration.…”