Distributed Software-based Attestation for Node Compromise Detection in Sensor Networks

Sensors that operate in an unattended, harsh or hostile environment are vulnerable to compromises because their low costs preclude the use of expensive tamper-resistant hardware. Thus, an adversary may reprogram them with malicious code to launch various insider attacks. Based on verifying the genuineness of the running program, we propose two distributed software-based attestation schemes that are well tailored for sensor networks. These schemes are based on a pseudorandom noise generation mechanism and a lightweight block-based pseudorandom memory traversal algorithm. Each node is loaded with pseudorandom noise in its empty program memory before deployment, and later on multiple neighbors of a suspicious node collaborate to verify the integrity of the code running on this node in a distributed manner. Our analysis and simulation show that these schemes achieve high detection rate even when multiple compromised neighbors collude in an attestation process.