Counteracting Denial-of-Sleep Attacks in Wake-Up-Radio-Based Sensing Systems

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.