Distributed Self-healing Mechanisms for Securing Sensor Networks

Abstract : The specific goal of this proposal is to design and implement efficient self-healing mechanisms that allow a sensor network to recover from node compromises by itself. To achieve this goal, this proposal describes a self-healing framework that consists of three sequential phases: node compromise detection, node revocation and network reconfiguration, and focuses on designing efficient schemes for each of these phases. It proposes to identify suspicious sensor nodes through time synchronization protocols and location changes of sensor nodes, respectively, in addition to other sources of discovering suspicious nodes. It then investigates techniques to attest the authenticity of the code running in the suspected nodes to check if the suspected nodes are really compromised. Two key updating schemes, one for group key updating and the other for pairwise key updating, are proposed to invalidate the security keys possessed by the nodes that have been identified as compromised.