Secure and Energy Efficient Filtered Over-the-Air Internet of Things Setup in a Wireless Mesh Network for Firmware Freshness

Internet of Things (IoT) became more and more popular because of the raise of ubiquitous internet connected devices. In this regard, IoT nodes are often organized in wireless sensor networks to facilitate communication and perform a coral computation. Such a network is often employed in urban or rural areas, i.e., for traffic, fires, and floods monitoring. Nodes are, therefore, deployed in remote areas, preventing the possibility to frequently access them, i.e., for firmware update. In this context, over-the-air (OTA) firmware update is used to remotely change the behavior of one or more nodes. In this paper, we firstly build a wireless mesh network with microcontrollers (i.e., ESP32) and, therefore, propose a secure filtered O TA firmware update involving firmware freshness (i.e., quarantine when firmware is not up-to-date), key pairing, and digital signature for data integrity and non-repudiation. The system is evaluated in terms of deactivation time $(s)$, energy consumption $(kWh)$, and greenhouse gases $(\mathrm{kgCO}_{2}\mathrm{e})$, highlighting good results in terms of scalability for grouped updates.