Attestation in Wireless Sensor Networks

Attestation is a mechanism used by a trusted entity to validate the software integrity of an untrusted platform. Over the past few years, several attestation techniques have been proposed. While they all use variants of a challenge-response protocol, they make different assumptions about what an attacker can and cannot do. Thus, they propose intrinsically divergent validation approaches. We survey in this article the different approaches to attestation, focusing in particular on those aimed at Wireless Sensor Networks. We discuss the motivations, challenges, assumptions, and attacks of each approach. We then organise them into a taxonomy and discuss the state of the art, carefully analysing the advantages and disadvantages of each proposal. We also point towards the open research problems and give directions on how to address them.