SAKE: Software Attestation for Key Establishment in Sensor Networks

Abstract. This paper presents a protocol called SAKE (Software Attestation for Key Establishment), for establishing a shared key between any two neighboring nodes of a sensor network. SAKE guarantees the secrecy and authenticity of the key that is established, without requiring any prior authentic or secret information in either node. In other words, the attacker can read and modify the entire memory contents of both nodes before SAKE executes. Further, to the best of our knowledge, SAKE is the only protocol that can perform key re-establishment after sensor nodes are compromised, because the presence of the attacker's code in the memory of either protocol participant does not compromise the security of SAKE. Also, the attacker can perform any active or passive attack using an arbitrary number of malicious, colluding nodes. SAKE does not require any hardware modification to the sensor nodes, human mediation, or secure side channels. However, we do assume the setting of a computati...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: DCOSS
• Authors: Arvind Seshadri, Mark Luk, Adrian Perrig
• Keywords: DCOSS 2008, Distributed And Parallel Computing, Protocol Called Sake, Sensor Networks, Sensor Node