Network Data Remanence Side Channel Attack on SPREAD, H-SPREAD and Reverse AODV

Side Channel Attacks (SCAs) was first introduced by Paul Kocher in 1996 to break the secret key of cryptographic algorithms using the inherent property of the implementation along with the mathematical structure of the cipher. These categories of attacks become more robust as they do not require any mathematical cryptanalysis to retrieve the key. Instead, they exploit the timing measurements, power consumption, leaked electromagnetic radiation of the software/hardware platforms to execute key-dependent operations for the cipher. This, in turn, aids the adversary to gather some additional information about the computation. The overall concept of leaking secrets through side channel has been extended for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) that implements Secret Sharing (SS) Scheme to exchange secrets between two nodes across multiple paths. Now in the idealized network model, it is assumed that for such SS schemes, all the paths between the two communicating nodes are atomic and have the same propagation delay. However, in the real implementation of TCP/IP networks, the shares propagate through every link and switch sequentially. Hence the attacker can probe any number of paths or switches to get the residual shares from previous messages that still exist in the network even when a new message is being sent. This kind of side channel vulnerability is known as Network Data Remanence (NDR) attacks. In this paper, we specifically target two SS schemes named Secure Protocol for Reliable Data Delivery (SPREAD) and Hybrid-Secure Protocol for Reliable Data Delivery (H-SPREAD), and an on-demand routing protocol named Path Hopping Based on Reverse AODV (PHR-AODV) to launch NDR based side channel attacks on the WSNs. We then show two specific categories of NDR attacks; a) NDR Blind and b) NDR Planned on the schemes mentioned above. We use an in-house C++ library to simulate our proposed attacks, and the experimental results reveal that the impact of NDR Blind attacks is negligible for these schemes, whereas the probability of data recovery for NDR Planned attacker proportionally increases with the path length.