Abstract
Network reprogramming faces lots of threats from both external attackers and potentially compromised nodes. Security thus becomes a critical requirement for network reprogramming protocols. This paper describes a secure network reprogramming system called SecNRCC for dynamically reprogramable wireless sensor network. In SecNRCC, a light weight authentication method is firstly introduced for the reboot control command. Secondly, a program image preprocess method with security and loss-tolerance consideration is proposed. Furthermore, a novel immediate packet authentication algorithm with confidentiality consideration is also presented to resist the denial of service attacks exploiting the authentication delay, and finally, a weak authentication operation is performed before the digital signature verification to mitigate denial of service attacks against signature packets. The experimental results show that SecNRCC can securely disseminate the program image to all of node in the wireless sensor networks with acceptable latency and message cost. Copyright (c) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.