Light-Weight Integrity Monitoring Based on Hashing Time Validity

Real-time monitoring of node integrity is effective means to protect resource-restrained nodes. By identifying main tampering attack modes against resource-restrained nodes, and analysiing the influence on hashing time, pure-software integrity monitoring means based on inspecting hashing time validity is suggested. On the basis of analysing testability condition of hashing time validity, checksum forging punishment coefficient is proposed to indicate tamper-resisting performance of monitor mechanism, and a light-weight hashing algorithm of merging program states is put forward. By simplifying hashing structure and integrating program states into checksum, checksum forging is made more difficult. Damaged nodes have to spend much more time on extra work like restoring legal code and program states than on hashing if they want to aquire the correct checksum. Hence, the proposed mechanism imposes much greater checksum forging punishment on damaged nodes than other approaches like SWATT and Shah. In order to prevent message forging or tampering during transmission over communication networks, a monitoring protocol supporting message authentication is designed. For tolerating influence from hashing time fluctuation and checksum guess, node integrity state is evaluated from results of both checksum comparison and hashing time validity statistics. The experiments show that the proposed approach achieves high reliabiliy in examining validity of checksum and hashing time with small cost. Toleration ability against fluctuation disturbance on hashing time from node multi-tasking environment and communication networks is improved, and hence tamper-resisting performance of resource-constrained nodes is enhanced.