Fighting Insomnia: A Secure Wake-Up Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Sleep deprivation attacks are still an unsolved but critical problem in sensor networks. They aim on quickly exhausting energy reserves of battery-powered sensor nodes by continuously sending messages to the node, preventing the attacked node to switch to an energy-saving sleep state. Sleep deprivation attacks come also in the form of sending traffic that causes a sleeping node to wake-up. Sleep deprivation attacks have the potential to lessen the lifetime of typical sensor nodes from years to days or even hours. One important communication standard for sensor networks is IEEE 802.15.4 that defines cryptographic protection of frames. While many attacks like eavesdropping or modification of frames are covered by the available security mechanisms, these mechanisms do not address sleep deprivation attacks. This paper proposes a secure wake-up scheme that activates a sensor node by a secure wake-up radio from a sleep state only if messages from an authenticated and legitimate node are pending. A lightweight security verification scheme is used that can easily be performed without requiring the node to change to active state.