Distributed Software-Attestation Defense against Sensor Worm Propagation

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks are vulnerable to sensor worm attacks in which the attacker compromises a few nodes and makes these compromised nodes initiate worm spread over the network, targeting the worm infection of the whole nodes in the network. Several defense mechanisms have been proposed to prevent worm propagation in wireless sensor networks. Although these proposed schemes use software diversity technique for worm propagation prevention under the belief that different software versions do not have common vulnerability, they have fundamental drawback in which it is difficult to realize the aforementioned belief in sensor motes. To resolve this problem, we propose on-demand software-attestation based scheme to defend against worm propagation in sensor network. The main idea of our proposed scheme is to perform software attestations against sensor nodes in on-demand manner and detect the infected nodes by worm, resulting in worm propagation block in the network. Through analysis, we show that our proposed scheme defends against worm propagation in efficient and robust manner. Through simulation, we demonstrate that our proposed scheme stops worm propagation at the reasonable overhead while preventing a majority of sensor nodes from being infected by worm.