Seluge: Secure and DoS-Resistant Code Dissemination in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are considered ideal candidates for a wide range of applications, such as industry monitoring, data acquisition in hazardous environments, and military operations. It is desirable and sometimes necessary to reprogram sensor nodes through wireless links after deployment, due to, for example, the need of removing bugs and adding new functionalities. The process of propagating a new code image to the nodes in a wireless sensor network is referred to as code dissemination. This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of an efficient, secure, robust, and DoS-resistant code dissemination system named Seluge for wireless sensor networks. Seluge is a secure extension to Deluge, an open source, state-of-the-art code dissemination system for wireless sensor networks. It provides security protections for code dissemination, including the integrity protection of code images and immunity from, to the best of our knowledge, all DoS attacks that exploit code dissemination protocols. Seluge is superior to all previous attempts for secure code dissemination, and is the only solution that seamlessly integrates the security mechanisms and the Deluge efficient propagation strategies. Besides the theoretical analysis that demonstrates the security and performance of Seluge, this paper also reports the experimental evaluation of Seluge in a network of MicaZ motes, which shows the efficiency of Seluge in practice.