Improving Resilience Against Node Capture Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks Using ICmetrics

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have the potential of being employed in a variety of applications ranging from battlefield surveillance to everyday applications such as smart homes and patient monitoring. Security is a major challenge that all applications based on WSNs are facing nowadays. Firstly, due to the wireless nature of WSNs, and secondly due to their ability to operate in unattended environments makes them even more vulnerable to various sorts of attacks. Among these attacks is node capture attack in WSNs, whose threat severity can range from a single node being compromised in the network to the whole network being compromised as a result of that single node compromise. In this paper, we propose the use of ICMetric technology to provide resilience against node compromise in WSN. ICmetrics generates the security attributes of the sensor node based on measurable hardware and software characteristics of the integrated circuit. These properties of ICmetrics can help safeguard WSNs from various node capture attacks.