Improving sensor network immunity under worm attacks: a software diversity approach

Because of cost and resource constraints, sensor nodes do not have a complicated hardware architecture or operating system to protect program safety. Hence, the notorious buffer-overflow vulnerability that has caused numerous Internet worm attacks could also be exploited to attack sensor networks. We call the malicious code that exploits a buffer-overflow vulnerability in a sensor program sensor worm. Clearly, sensor worm will be a serious threat, if not the most dangerous one, when an attacker could simply send a single packet to compromise the entire sensor network. Despite its importance, so far little work has been focused on sensor worms. In this work, we first illustrate the feasibility of launching sensor worms through real experiments on Mica2 motes. Inspired by the survivability through heterogeneity philosophy, we then explore the technique of software diversity to combat sensor worms. Given a limited number of software versions, we design an efficient algorithm to assign th...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: MOBIHOC
• Authors: Yi Yang, Sencun Zhu, Guohong Cao
• Keywords: MOBIHOC 2008, Sensor Node Deployment, Sensor Program Sensor, Sensor Worms, Wireless Networks