Distributed Authentication of Program Integrity Verification in Wireless Sensor Networks

Security in wireless sensor networks has become important as sensor networks are being used for an increasing number of applications. The severe resource constraints in each sensor make it very challenging to secure sensor networks. Moreover, sensors are usually deployed in hostile and unattended environments, and hence, are susceptible to various attacks, including node capture, physical tampering, and manipulation of the sensor program. The authors of T. Park and K.G. Shin, (2005) proposed a soft tamper-proofing scheme that verifies the integrity of the program in each sensor device, called the program integrity verification (PIV). This paper addresses how to authenticate PIV servers (PIVSes) in a fully-distributed manner. Our distributed authentication protocol of PIVSes (DAPP) uses the Blundo scheme (C. Blundo et al., 1992) and allows sensors to authenticate PIVSes without requiring commonly-used trusted third parties, such as authentication servers (ASes), in the network. We implement and evaluate both the DAPP and the PIV on Mica2 Motes and laptops. We also analyze the security of DAPP under different attack models, demonstrating its capability to deal with various types of attacks