SWARD: A Secure WAke-up RaDio against Denial-of-Service on IoT devices

Maxime Montoya (1) , Simone Bacles-Min (1) , Anca Molnos (1) , Jacques J.A. Fournier (1)

1 CEA-LETI - Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives - Laboratoire d'Electronique et de Technologie de l'Information

Wake-up radios are mechanisms that control the sleep and active modes of energy-constrained Internet of Things (IoT) nodes. These radios detect predetermined wake-up tokens and switch the devices to an active state. Such systems are vulnerable to a kind of Denial-of-Service attacks called Denial-of-Sleep, where attackers continuously send wake-up tokens to deplete the battery of the nodes. We propose a protocol to mitigate these attacks that includes a novel solution to generate hard-to-guess wake-up tokens at every wake-up. Simulations show that under standard operating conditions, it has a negligible energy overhead (0.03%), while it increases the lifetime of an IoT node by more than 40 times under Denial-of-Sleep attack. Finally, we compare our protocol to related work against Denial-of-Sleep attacks, and explain why it is both more resilient and more energy-efficient than existing approaches.

Keywords: Network security; Wake-up radio; Denial-of-Service; Wireless Sensor Networks; Internet of Things

Domains: Cryptography and Security [cs.CR]; Embedded Systems; Micro and nanotechnologies/Microelectronics

Maxime Montoya, Simone Bacles-Min, Anca Molnos, Jacques J.A. Fournier. SWARD: A Secure WAke-up RaDio against Denial-of-Service on IoT devices. 11th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks (WiSec'18), Jun 2018, Stockholm, Sweden. ⟨10.1145/3212480.3212488⟩. ⟨cea-01922847⟩