Abstract
Wireless sensor networks are envisioned to be deployed in mission-critical applications. Detecting a compromised sensor, whose memory contents have been tampered, is crucial in these settings, as the attacker can reprogram the sensor to act on his behalf. In the case of sensors, the task of verifying the integrity of memory contents is difficult as physical access to the sensors is often infeasible. In this paper, we propose a software-based approach to verify the integrity of the memory contents of the sensors over the network without requiring physical contact with the sensor. We describe the building blocks that can be used to build a program for attestation purposes, and build our attestation program based on these primitives. The success of our approach is not dependent on accurate measurements of the execution time of the attestation program. Further, we do not require any additional hardware support for performing remote attestation. Our attestation procedure is designed to detect even small memory changes and is designed to be resistant against modifications by the attacker.
Access provided by Autonomous University of Puebla. Download to read the full chapter text
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
References
Atmel AVR 8-bit RISC processor, http://www.atmel.com/atmel/products/prod23.htm
Mica2 series, http://www.xbow.com/Products/Product_pdf_files/Wireless_pdf/MICA2_Datasheet.pdf
TI MSP-430 processor, http://focus.ti.com/mcu/docs/techdocs.tsp?navSection=user_guides&templateId=5246&familyId=342
Aucsmith, D.: Tamper resistant software. In: Proceedings of the First Information Hiding Workshop (1996)
Barak, B., Goldreich, O., Impagliazzo, R., Rudich, S., Sahai, A., Vadhan, S.P., Yang, K.: On the (im)possibility of obfuscating programs. In: Kilian, J. (ed.) CRYPTO 2001. LNCS, vol. 2139, pp. 1–18. Springer, Heidelberg (2001)
Chang, H., Atallah, M.J.: Protecting software code by guards. In: Sander, T. (ed.) DRM 2001. LNCS, vol. 2320, pp. 160–175. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)
Cohen, F.: Operating system protection through program evolution. Computers and Security (1993)
Collberg, C., Thomborson, C., Low, D.: A taxonomy of obfuscating transformations. Technical report, Technical Report 148, Department of Computer Science, University of Auckland (July 1997)
Collberg, C., Thomborson, C., Low, D.: Manufacturing cheap, resilient, and stealthy opaque constructs. In: Principles of Programming Languages 1998, POPL 1998, San Diego, CA (January 1998)
Collberg, C.S., Thomborson, C.: Watermarking, tamper-proofing, and obfuscation - tools for software protection. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 28, 735–746 (2002)
Wurster, A.S.G., van Oorschot, P.C.: A generic attack on checksumming-based software tamper resistance. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (May 2005)
Gassend, B., Clarke, D., van Dijk, M., Devadas, S.: Controlled Physical Random Functions. In: Proceedings of the 18th Annual Computer Security Conference (December 2002)
Gassend, B.L.P.: Physical random functions. Master’s thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (February 2003)
Hada, S.: Zero-knowledge and code obfuscation. In: Okamoto, T. (ed.) ASIACRYPT 2000. LNCS, vol. 1976, pp. 443–457. Springer, Heidelberg (2000)
Hill, J., Szewczyk, R., Woo, A., Hollar, S., Culler, D., Pister, K.: System architecture directions for network sensors. In: ASPLOS-IX: Proceedings of the ninth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems, Cambridge (November 2000)
Horne, B., Matheson, L.R., Sheehan, C., Tarjan, R.E.: Dynamic self-checking techniques for improved tamper resistance. In: Sander, T. (ed.) DRM 2001. LNCS, vol. 2320, pp. 141–159. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)
Horwitz, S.: Precise flow-insensitive may-alias analysis is np-hard. ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst. 19(1), 1–6 (1997), doi:10.1145/239912.239913
Jeong, J., Culler, D.: Incremental network programming for wireless sensors. In: The First IEEE International Conference on Sensor and Ad hoc Communications and Networks (October 2004)
Jr., N.L.P., Fraser, T., Molina, J., Arbaugh, W.A.: Copilot - a coprocessor-based kernel runtime integrity monitor. In: USENIX Security Symposium, pp. 179–194 (2004)
Kennell, R., Jamieson, L.H.: Establishing the genuinity of remote computer systems. In: 12th USENIX Security Symposium, August 2003, pp. 295–310. USENIX Association (2003)
Kennell, R., Jamieson, L.H.: An analysis of proposed attacks against genuinity tests. Technical report, Purdue University, 09, CERIAS TR 2004-27 (2004)
Kruegel, C., Robertson, W., Valeur, F., Vigna, G.: Static disassembly of obfuscated binaries. In: Proceedings of USENIX Security 2004, San Diego, CA, August 2004, pp. 255–270 (2004)
Kuennen, T.: Small science will bring big changes to roads, http://www.betterroads.com/articles/jul04a.htm
Landi, W., Ryder, B.G.: Pointer-induced aliasing: a problem taxonomy. In: POPL 1991: Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages, Orlando, Florida, United States, pp. 93–103. ACM Press, New York (1991)
Lie, D., Thekkath, C., Mitchell, M., Lincoln, P., Boneh, D., Mitchell, J., Horowitz, M.: Architectural support for copy and tamper resistant software. In: ASPLOS-IX: Proceedings of the ninth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems, pp. 168–177. ACM Press, New York (2000)
Linn, C., Debray, S.: Obfuscation of executable code to improve resistance to static disassembly. In: CCS 2003: Proceedings of the 10th ACM conference on Computer and communications security, pp. 290–299. ACM Press, New York (2003)
Lynn, B.Y.S., Prabhakaran, M., Sahai, A.: Positive results and techniques for obfuscation. In: Cachin, C., Camenisch, J.L. (eds.) EUROCRYPT 2004. LNCS, vol. 3027, pp. 20–39. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Ogiso, T., Sakabe, Y., Soshi, M., Miyaji, A.: Software tamper resistance based on the difficulty of interprocedural analysis (August 2002)
Ogiso, T., Sakabe, Y., Soshi, M., Miyaji, A.: Software obfuscation on a theoretical basis and its implementation. In: IEICE Transactions on Fundamentals, January 2003, vol. E86-A, pp. 176–186 (2003)
Ramalingam, G.: The undecidability of aliasing. ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst. 16(5), 1467–1471 (1994), doi:10.1145/186025.186041
Sailer, R., Jaeger, T., Zhang, X., van Doorn, L.: Attestation-based policy enforcement for remote access. In: CCS 2004: Proceedings of the 11th ACM conference on Computer and communications security, pp. 308–317. ACM Press, New York (2004)
Seshadri, A., Perrig, A., van Doorn, L., Khosla, P.: SWATT: Software-based Attestation for Embedded Devicesi. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (May 2004)
Shankar, U., Chew, M., Tygar, J.: Side effects are not sufficient to authenticate software. In: 13th USENIX Security Symposium, August 2004, USENIX Association (2004)
Shi, E., Perrig, A., Doorn, L.V.: Bind: A time-of-use attestation service for secure distributed systems. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (May 2005)
Suh, G.E., Clarke, D., Gassend, B., van Dijk, M., Devadas, S.: AEGIS: architecture for tamper-evident and tamper-resistant processing. In: ICS 2003: Proceedings of the 17th annual international conference on Supercomputing, pp. 160–171. ACM Press, New York (2003)
Varnovsky, N.P., Zakharov, V.A.: On the possibility of provably secure obfuscating programs. In: Ershov Memorial Conference, pp. 91–102 (2003)
Wang, C., Hill, J., Knight, J., Davidson, J.: Software tamper resistance: Obstructing static analysis of programs. Technical report, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA (2000)
Wroblewski, G.: General Method of Program Code Obfuscation. PhD thesis, Wroclaw University of Technology, Institute of Engineering Cybernetics (2002)
Yang, J., Zhang, Y., Gao, L.: Fast secure processor for inhibiting software piracy and tampering. In: MICRO 36: Proceedings of the 36th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture, Washington, DC, USA, p. 351. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos (2003)
Zhuang, X., Zhang, T., Pande, S.: HIDE: an infrastructure for efficiently protecting information leakage on the address bus. In: ASPLOS-XI: Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems, Boston, MA, USA, pp. 72–84. ACM Press, New York (2004)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Shaneck, M., Mahadevan, K., Kher, V., Kim, Y. (2005). Remote Software-Based Attestation for Wireless Sensors. In: Molva, R., Tsudik, G., Westhoff, D. (eds) Security and Privacy in Ad-hoc and Sensor Networks. ESAS 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3813. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11601494_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11601494_3
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-30912-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-31615-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)