Secure sensor network communication protocols need to provide three basic properties: data secrecy, authentication, and replay protection. Secure sensor network link layer protocols such as Tiny-Sec [10] and ZigBee [24] enjoy significant attention in the community. However, TinySec achieves low energy consumption by reducing the level of security provided. In contrast, ZigBee enjoys high security, but suffers from high energy consumption.

Existing protocols for secure key establishment all rely on an unspecified mechanism for initially deploying secrets to sensor nodes. However, no commercially viable and secure mechanism exists for initial setup. Without a guarantee of secure key deployment, the traffic over a sensor network cannot be presumed secure.

We propose SecVisor, a tiny hypervisor that ensures code integrity for commodity OS kernels. In particular, SecVisor ensures that only user-approved code can execute in kernel mode over the entire system lifetime. This protects the kernel against code injection attacks, such as kernel rootkits. SecVisor can achieve this propertyeven against an attacker who controls everything but the CPU, the memory controller, and system memory chips. Further, SecVisor can even defend against attackers with knowledge of zero-day kernel exploits.

The deployment of sensor networks in security- and safety-critical environments requires secure communication primitives. In this paper, we design, implement, and evaluate a new secure routing protocol for sensor networks. Our protocol requires no special hardware and provides message delivery even in an environment with active adversaries. We adopt a clean-slate approach and design a new sensor network routing protocol with security and efficiency as central design parameters. Our protocol is efficient yet highly resilient to active attacks. We demonstrate the performance of our algorithms with simulation results as well as an implementation on Telos sensor nodes.

We propose a primitive, called Pioneer, as a first step towards verifiable code execution on untrusted legacy hosts. Pioneer does not require any hardware support such as secure co-processors or CPU-architecture extensions. We implement Pioneer on an Intel Pentium IV Xeon processor. Pioneer can be used as a basic building block to build security systems. We demonstrate this by building a kernel rootkit detector.