Secure Multihop Network Programming with Multiple One-Way Key Chains

Current network programming protocols provide an efficient way to update program images running on sensor nodes without having physical access to them. Securing these updates, however, remains a challenging and important issue, given the open environment where sensor nodes are often deployed. Several approaches addressing these issues have been reported, but their use of cryptographically strong protocols means that their computational costs (and hence, power consumption and communication costs) are relatively high. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme to secure a multihop network programming protocol through the use of multiple one-way hash chains. The scheme is shown to be lower in computational, power consumption, and communication costs yet still able to secure multihop propagation of program images. We demonstrate the use of this scheme and provide some results using the popular network programming protocol, Deluge. In addition, we include a performance evaluation of our scheme, implemented in TinyOS, in terms of latency and energy consumption.