A software-based group attestation for wireless sensor networks

Sensor nodes are vulnerable to compromise due to their unattended deployment. The low cost requirement of the sensor node precludes the use of expensive tamper resistant hardware for sensor physical protection. Therefore, the adversary can easily reprogram the compromised sensors and deviate their functionality.We address this problem by proposing softwarebased remote code attestation mechanisms for different WSN scenarios, which can limit the misuse introduced by malicious attackers. An attestation scheme of node-to-base station is proposed and generalized to two distributed group based attestation schemes. Our group based attestation schemes localize the attestation process and substitute the need for running multi hops attestation for each node out of the base station range. The simulation results show that proposed schemes are feasible and well-suited for wireless sensors. Moreover, we analyze the security of the proposed protocols and show that, unlike the previously related proposed work in literature, the proposed schemes loosely depend on the accurate measurement of the execution time.