Detecting Malicious Code in Sensor Network Applications Using Petri Nets

Abstract

Sensor Network reprogramming is essential and crucial for software updates or bug fixes on nodes. Reprogramming is a challenging task as attackers can insert malicious code during code propagation. Such code propagates in an epidemic way bringing down the whole network. The proposed model called Malicious Code Detector is based on Petri nets. The strategy to use Petri nets to model attacks is to understand the properties of the attacks. The proposed system model detects the malicious code at each node. The main components of the System are Detection Tool and library of attack Petri nets. The Detection Tool based on a Detection Algorithm transforms code to Petri nets and uses attack Petri nets to detect the presence of corrupt code/attacks in the sensor application. Detecting such corrupt code can lead to shutting down of that particular node and preventing further propagation of this malicious code throughout the network.