A remote attestation protocol with Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs) in wireless sensor networks.
Hailun Tan, Wen Song Hu, Sanjay Kumar Jha · Security and Communication Networks · 2015
Given the limited resources and computational power of current embedded sensor devices, memory protection is difficult to achieve and generally unavailable. Hence, the software run-time buffer overflow that is used by the worm attacks in the Internet could be easily exploited to inject malicious codes into wireless sensor networks (WSNs). As a result, the remote attestation on the application codes installed in WSNs is the first important step to detect any unauthorized changes through the buffer overflow attack. Previous software-based remote code verification approaches such as SoftWare-based ATTestation and Secure Code Update By Attestation have been shown difficult to deploy in recent work. In this paper, we propose and implement a remote attestation protocol for detecting unauthorized tampering in the application codes running on sensor nodes with the assistance of Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs), a tiny, cost-effective and tamper-proof cryptographic micro-controller. In our design, each sensor node is equipped with a TPM, and the firmware running on the node could be verified by the other sensor nodes in a WSN, including the sink. Specifically, we present a hardware-based remote attestation protocol, discuss the potential attacks an adversary could launch against the protocol and provide comprehensive system performance results of the protocol in a multi-hop sensor network testbed. The experimental results demonstrated that our scheme is able to attest the application codes running in sensor node with small delay (less than 25 s for single-hop), considerable network lifetime and reasonable communication and energy overhead. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.