NeTS-NOSS: Secure, Robust and DoS-Resilient Code Dissemination in Wireless Sensor Networks

North Carolina State University, Raleigh NC

Investigators

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks are ideal candidates for a wide range of applications, such as monitoring of critical infrastructures, data acquisition in hazardous environments, and military operations. It is usually necessary to reprogram sensor nodes after they are deployed through wireless links. This project is aimed at investigating secure, robust, and DoS-resilient remote programming of sensor nodes through wireless links. First, this project develops a novel reliability mechanism that integrates proactive transmission and NACK mechanisms to tolerate packet losses during code dissemination efficiently. Second, this research integrates efficient authentication mechanisms into this approach to guarantee the integrity of disseminated code images. Third, this project develops weak authentication mechanisms to mitigate the potential DoS attacks aimed at consuming the resources (particularly the battery power) of sensor nodes. Fourth, this project extends the above techniques to provide secure, proactively robust, and DoS-resilient code dissemination in hybrid sensor networks, where there are both high-end nodes (e.g., PDAs, Intel mote 2) connected through high-capacity wireless links (e.g., 802.11) and low-end nodes (e.g., MicaZ motes) connected via low-power wireless links (e.g., 802.15.4). To achieve a thorough understanding of these techniques, this project implements all the proposed techniques and evaluates them in a hybrid wireless sensor network test-bed named WiSeNeT at North Carolina State University.