A randomized, efficient, and distributed protocol for the detection of node replication attacks in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks are often deployed in hostile environments, where anadversary can physically capture some of the nodes. Once a node is captured, the attackercan re-program it and replicate the node in a large number of clones, thus easily taking over the network. The detection of node replication attacks in a wireless sensor network is therefore a fundamental problem. A few distributed solutions have recently been proposed. However, these solutions are not satisfactory. First, they are energy and memory demanding: A serious drawback for any protocol that is to be used in resource constrained environment such as a sensor network. Further, they are vulnerable to specific adversary models introduced in this paper. The contributions of this work are threefold. First, we analyze the desirable properties of a distributed mechanism for the detection of node replication attacks. Second, we show that the known solutions for this problem do not completely meet our requirements. Third, we propose a new Randomized, Efficient, and Distributed (RED) protocol for the detection of node replication attacks and we show that it is completely satisfactory with respect to the requirements. Extensive simulations also show that our protocol is highly efficient in communication, memory, and computation, that it sets out an improved attack detection probability compared to the best solutions in the literature, and that it is resistant to the new kind of attacks we introduce in this paper, while other solutions are not. Copyright 2007 ACM

A Resilient and Efficient Replication Attack Detection Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

“…In this section, we demonstrate the security and performance of our proposed approach compared with RED [3], and LM [4]. First, to assess the robustness against node compromise attack, we measured P r by increasing the number of compromised nodes, which are intelligently selected in each scheme: In RED [3], the nodes are located in the center of the network and are highly likely to be intermediate nodes on every communication path.…”

“…Mauro et al [3] proposed RED (Randomized, Efficient, and Distributed Protocol), which requires all sensors to be synchronized with a Base Station (BS) and have the same random value at a certain time through periodic broadcast beacons. To determine a witness point randomly, each node uses the pseudo random function, which takes in the id of a node and the current random value.…”

“…Moreover, our scheme does not require the public key operation to generate or verify the signature. At first glance, the total resource consumption in the RED [3] is effective, except for the computation. However, RED [3] …”

Social closeness based clone attack detection for mobile healthcare system

“…(these methods can only be used in static network) Several software-based clone attack detection schemes have been proposed for sensor networks [7], [11]. The main idea of these schemes is to let each node report its locations and attempt to find conflicting reports that one node resides in multiple locations.…”

A Range-assisted Detection Protocol against Replication Attacks in WSNs

“…With the development of wireless sensor networks, building a wireless sensor networks requires suitable security protocols [3]. Replication attack (or clone attack) is a common attack mode in WSNs [4]- [5]. Replicas can launch a variety of attacks such as creating a black hole or initiating a wormhole attack [6]- [8].…”