Code Attestation Based Intrusion Detection System for Compression Attack in Wireless Sensor Networks

These days, the Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) find potentially versatile applications in diverse areas ranging from environment monitoring, defense, industrial process monitoring and control, homeland securities and many more. Critical data flow is inherently present in these applications and despite all the inbuilt measures for ensuring network and information security, adversarial intrusions cannot be ruled out. Hence, such systems require sound intrusion detection and prevention mechanisms that work efficiently in resource constrained sensor nodes, too. One of the methods of doing so is to periodically check the prover sensor nodes for any alteration in its code/data as compared to the same when originally deployed by the verifier sensor node. This is known as code/data attestation; useful in verifying the program integrity of nodes in such networks. Our focus here is on software based remote code attestation. Software based code attestation techniques are vulnerable to various attacks. We focus on compression attack, and propose a scheme for mitigating the same, here. To withstand the compression attacks, the original program code is compressed and fresh random noise is inserted within the available free space. In existing attestation algorithms the fresh random noise is generated by the verifier and sent to the prover sensor node in numerous packets. Here we utilize the random challenge sent by the verifier to generate the fresh random noise at the prover node. Hence, we propose an algorithm that withstands the compression attack at lesser communication overhead compared to the existing attestation algorithms.