Towards Secure Network Programming and Recovery in Wireless Sensor Networks - 11/04/2005

XiangPing (Sandra) Qin

In this talk, I will present the paper by the group from UC, Berkeley, on a security and recovery scheme that provide authentication for the network programming. Traditional techniques for authenticating a program based on the digital signature of the hash of a program is not suited to the resouce-constrained sensor nodes. This new scheme uses a hash chain and by signing only the first hash to provide anthentication. It is implemented using TinyOS and demonstrated that the overhead incurred is small compared with the cost of the network programming. The recovery is provided by periodically resetting the node which executes a trusted bootloader located in the boot block. In the recovery system, both on- and off- chip hardware support in the form of write-protected boot block and a grenade timer is required.