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Secure Erasure and Code Update in Legacy Sensors

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Trust and Trustworthy Computing (Trust 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 9229))

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Abstract

Sensors require frequent over-the-air reprogramming to patch software errors, replace code, change sensor configuration, etc. Given their limited computational capability, one of the few workable techniques to secure code update in legacy sensors would be to execute Proofs of Secure Erasure (PoSE) which ensure that the sensor’s memory is purged before sending the updated code. By doing so, the updated code can be loaded onto the sensor with the assurance that no other malicious code is being stored. Although current PoSE proposals rely on relatively simple cryptographic constructs, they still result in considerable energy and time overhead in existing legacy sensors.

In this paper, we propose a secure code update protocol which considerably reduces the overhead of existing proposals. Our proposal naturally combines PoSE with All or Nothing Transforms (AONT); we analyze the security of our scheme and evaluate its performance by means of implementation on MicaZ motes. Our prototype implementation only consumes 371 bytes of RAM in TinyOS2, and improves the time and energy overhead of existing proposals based on PoSE by almost 75 %.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In case the code size to be updated is smaller than the total writable memory of the device, the verifier pads the code with zeros until it reaches the device’s memory size.

  2. 2.

    As shown in [22], computing an HMAC-SHA1 over 648 KB of data in a MicaZ mote requires almost 90 s.

  3. 3.

    The maximum claimed transmission throughput of TI-CC2420 radio chip used in MicaZ motes is 250 kbps, which translates to 31250 bytes/sec. However, our experiments show that the effective throughput is around 8860 bytes/sec using TinyOS 2.0.

  4. 4.

    For that purpose, we extended the ProgFlash interface using AVR Libc.

  5. 5.

    In this case, the probability to detect that a prover did not delete 1,000 bits of its old code is 0.9.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. NEC Laboratories Europe, 69115, Heidelberg, Germany

    Ghassan O. Karame & Wenting Li

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  1. Ghassan O. Karame
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  2. Wenting Li
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Correspondence to Ghassan O. Karame .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Padua, Padua, Italy

    Mauro Conti

  2. Intel Labs, Darmstadt, Germany

    Matthias Schunter

  3. - Hellas (FORTH), Crete, Institute of Computer Science (ICS), Foundation for Research & Technology, Heraklion, Greece

    Ioannis Askoxylakis

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Karame, G.O., Li, W. (2015). Secure Erasure and Code Update in Legacy Sensors. In: Conti, M., Schunter, M., Askoxylakis, I. (eds) Trust and Trustworthy Computing. Trust 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9229. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22846-4_17

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22846-4_17

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