A Defense Strategy against Energy Exhausting Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

One of the most challenging issues in wireless sensor networks is resilience against malicious attacks. Since energy is the most precious resource for these networks, Denial of sleep attacks is recognized as one of the most serious threats. Such attacks exhaust power supply of sensor nodes and can reduce the sensor lifetime from years to days. Authentication and encryption solutions have been proposed to protect the network from denial of sleep attacks. Though, the resources constraint motivates the use of simpler solutions to the same security challenges. In this paper, we survey different types of denial of sleep attacks and we propose a cross layer energy efficient security mechanism to protect the network from these attacks. The cross layer interaction between network Mac and physical layers is mainly exploited to identify the intruders’ nodes and prevent sensor nodes from energy exhaust attacks. Simulation results indicate that our proposal is energy efficient and can significantly reduce the effect of denial of sleep attacks

RBCP-WSN: The Reliable Biderectional Control Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

“…The node activity time is equal to 15% of entire cycle. Time values in the node operation mode was adopted based on the default operating times of SMAC protocol [20]. The simulation time was set to 100 second.…”

Evaluation of Resource Exhaustion Attacks against Wireless Mobile Devices

“…The papers [12,25] address denial of sleep attacks. Boubiche, et al [12] propose a mechanism to create an intermediate level for effective protection against attacks on the exhaustion of the battery at the crossing of the physical and data link layers [13]. In particular, they analyze the following types of attacks: sleep deprivation, barrage, replay, broadcast, collision and synchronization attacks.…”

“…• specific types of ERE attacks, such as vampire attacks [1][2][3], denial-of-sleep attacks [4][5][6][7][8], attacks on specific crypto-protocols, causing increased power consumption on their executing devices [9], various jamming attacks [10,11], replay attacks and collision attacks [12], etc. ; • specific applications and systems analyzed for possible ERE attacks, such as attacks on personal portable mobile devices in direct line of sight [13,14], combined attacks on mobile devices, using vulnerabilities of a cellular network server [15], attacks on separately located sensors [16], attacks on mesh networks built on specific network protocols [17], attacks on drones [18], attacks on implantable medical devices, taking into account various ways to replenish their charge [19], etc.…”

Energy Life-Time of Wireless Nodes with Network Attacks and Mitigation

“…Sleep deprivation attacks are designed to keep sensor nodes awake as long as possible to increase their energy consumption, and reduce the battery life of a sensor from months to days, and also include [2], [16] barrage, synchronization, replay, broadcast, and collision attacks. Typically, a node that receives a request to receive data from another node, can check its routing table to see whether it may receive data from that node; if not it discards the request and goes to sleep.…”

“…Since the attack uses the replay of messages with small changes, it can fool other nodes by convincing them that repeated messages concern a new message exchange. Note that in wireless networks [16] the received signal can help identify malicious nodes through their use of a stronger signal [22].…”