Simulation study on code attestation with compressed instruction code

Available purely software based code attestation protocols for wireless sensor nodes have recently been shown to be cheatable. For instance, an attacker can gain free space within a node´s program memory through a so called compression attack to subsequently inject a bogus code image, compromising the node. In this work we propose and implement a code attestation protocol that uploads yet compressed instruction code to a node during deployment. The code image is loaded compressed to raise and subsequently detect the overhead of attacks aiming to inject bogus code into a node´s program memory. The described secure code attestation protocol makes use of proposed micro-controller architectures for reading out compressed instruction code.