Secure and user-friendly over-the-air firmware distribution in a portable faraday cage

Abstract

Setting up a large-scale wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is challenging, as firmware must be distributed and trust between sensor nodes and a backend needs to be established. To perform this task efficiently, we propose an approach named Box, which utilizes an intelligent Faraday Cage (FC). The FC acquires firmware images and secret keys from a backend, patches the firmware with the keys and deploys those customized images over-the-air (OTA) to sensor nodes placed in the FC. Electromagnetic (EM) shielding protects this exchange against passive attackers. We place few demands on the sensor node, not requiring additional hardware components or firmware customized by the manufacturer. We describe this novel workflow, implement the Box and a backend system and demonstrate the feasibility of our approach by batch-deploying firmware to multiple commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) sensor nodes. We conduct a user-study with 31 participants with diverse backgrounds and find, that our approach is both faster and more user-friendly than firmware distribution over a wired connection.

Scalable and Energy Efficient Cluster Based Anomaly Detection against Dos Attacks in WSN

“…In practice, RFAF cannot be used in wireless sensor networks, even under ideal conditions, to determine neighbor hop distances. Besides, the identity-based attack detection results are derived by the K-means algorithm in the received signal strength [6,[13][14]. Here, the cluster centroids through signal space serve as the reference to the process of position.…”