Survey on Secure Updates using Over the Air Programming in Wireless Sensor Network

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) face many challenges including reliability, flexibility and security. When WSNs deployed in remote locations need to be reprogrammed, environmental conditions often make it impossible to physically retrieve them. Over the Air Programming (OAP) plays an important role in achieving this task. Over-the-air programming (OAP) is a fundamental service in sensor networks that relies upon reliable broadcast for efficient dissemination. SenSeOP Programming protocols provide a convenient way to update program images via wireless communication. In hostile environments where there may be malicious attacks against wireless sensor networks, the process of reprogramming faces threats from potentially compromised nodes. While existing solutions can provide authentication services, they are insufficient for a new generation of network coding-based reprogramming protocols in wireless sensor networks. We present a security approach that is able to defend pollution attack against reprogramming protocols based on network coding. It employs a homomorphic hashing function and an identity-based aggregate signature to allow sensor nodes to check packets on-the-fly before they accept incoming encoded packets, and introduces an efficient mechanism to reduce the computation overhead at each node and to eliminate bad packets quickly. In this paper, introduce SenSeOP, a selective and secure OTAP protocol for WSNs. For this purpose, the proposed protocol uses multicast transfer supported by cryptography. We evaluate the performance of our approach in real testbeds, compare it with state-of-the-art protocols, and show that this approach enables efficient and reliable wireless reprogramming.