Yasic: Yet-another software integrity checker for security-critical wireless sensor networks

Abstract

In wireless sensor networks, sensor nodes are deployed in remote regions to sense events. This makes the sensor nodes to be easily captured by some adversary who wants to compromise software on the nodes. Then, the compromised sensor node may pretend to be a normal node to fool director of the wireless sensor networks. Several software integrity checker (or, in other words, attestation) have been made for networked embedded systems. However, the previous remote attestation scheme is not scalable, and the others are not feasible for delay-tolerant wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we present YASIC, which is a Yet-Another Software Integrity Checker for security-critical wireless sensor networks. YASIC provides energy-efficient, scalable, and delay-tolerant operation based on the remote software attestation scheme. Our analysis and performance evaluation results show that YASIC eliminates the false positive or negative warnings, and significantly reduces energy consumption compared with existing schemes.