Counteracting Denial-of-Sleep Attacks in Wake-up-radio-based Sensing Systems (IEEE SECON 2016)

Authors: Angelo Capossele, Valerio Cervo, Chiara Petrioli and Dora Spenza.
Department of Computer Science, University of Rome "La Sapienza"
http://senseslab.di.uniroma1.it

Music by: Pierlo - Upitup Records
http://www.upitup.com

Abstract:
Wake-up-radio-based sensing systems make use of radio-triggering techniques and ultra-low power wake-up receivers (WuRs) to enable on-demand asynchronous network wake ups. Thanks to this, they have the potential to achieve low latency data collection at minimum energy cost, thus meeting the challenging lifetime and quality-of-service demands of emerging Internet of Things (IoT) and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) applications. However, the fact that nodes can be remotely activated on-demand makes wake-up-radio-based networks vulnerable to energy exhausting attacks. In this paper, with a focus on practical implementation and validation, we present a full-fledged solution to counteract Denial-of-Sleep (DoS) attacks to wake-up-radio-based sensing systems. A core component of our proposed solution is a key exchange protocol based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (the Fully Hashed MQV protocol), which we use in conjunction with implicit certificates.