SecLEACH—On the security of clustered sensor networks

Oliveira, Leonardo B.; Ferreira, Adrian Carlos; Vilaça, Marco A.; Wong, Hao Chi; Bern, Marshall; Dahab, Ricardo; Loureiro, Antônio A. F.

doi:10.1016/j.sigpro.2007.05.016

Cited by 109 publications

(100 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…Therefore, our protocol avoids the single point failure and can be much more communication efficient than centralized schemes like those in [3], [4], [5]. Second, our protocol is also efficient in terms of computation overhead.…”

Section: E Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…This section briefly reviews existing approaches that are developed for sensor clustering in hostile situations [1], [2], [3], [7], [4], [5], [6]. We found that these protocols either ignore or do not effectively solve the security of leader election.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The protocols developed in [3], [7], [4], [5], [6] do consider the security of cluster leader election. However, they have a number of limitations.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, they have a number of limitations. The protocols in [3], [5], [4] simply ask the base station to make a centralized decision and announce the new leaders in the network. Such centralized approaches incur substantial communication and computation costs.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The security of leader election has been considered in several recent studies [3], [4], [5], [6], [7]. However, as we will show later, these protocols are either communication intensive, sensitive to message loss/delay, or vulnerable to simple DoS attacks.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Resilient Cluster Leader Election for Wireless Sensor Networks

Dong

Liu

2009

2009 6th Annual IEEE Communications Society Conference on Sensor, Mesh and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks

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Abstract-Sensor nodes are often organized into clusters for efficiency and scalability purposes. Every sensor cluster is managed by a cluster leader during the network operation such as routing and data aggregation. Since managing a cluster consumes substantial energy, the cluster leader needs to be re-elected from time to time for load balancing. In hostile environments, it is critical to ensure the security of such leader election. This paper proposes an efficient, resilient, and fully distributed leader election protocol for sensor networks. It only uses efficient symmetric key operations and guarantees that (i) benign cluster members will elect the same leader as long as they are wellconnected, and (ii) attackers cannot impact the leader election process to increase or decrease the chance of a benign member being elected as a cluster leader. In addition, the proposed method can quickly recover from message loss or malicious attacks. The evaluation results also demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of this approach. I. INTRODUCTIONIn a densely-deployed sensor network, sensors are usually organized into clusters for efficiency and scalability purposes. Every cluster contains a number of sensors that are physically close to each other and is managed by a cluster leader to facilitate the network operation such as in-network aggregation and routing. For instance, in data aggregation, a cluster leader can serve as the aggregator that collects the sensing results from other cluster members, computes the aggregation result, and reports the result to the base station.Since managing a cluster consumes substantial energy, the cluster leaders need to be re-elected from time to time for load balancing. The leader election problem is to ensure that each cluster will have a suitable sensor node be selected as the cluster leader whenever needed. A common election metric to determine the new leader of a given cluster is the remaining energy on sensor nodes. For the sake of presentation, we call the values (on sensor nodes) used for election purpose as the election values. In the above case, the election values will be the remaining energy reported by sensor nodes.A number of secure clustering protocols have been proposed recently for organizing clusters in sensor networks [1], [2]. These protocols significantly improve the security of clustering in the presence of malicious attacks. However, they only focus on the formation of clusters and do not consider the security of cluster leader election. Without proper protection, an attacker can easily subvert the intended purpose of clustering. For example, if the protocol selects the node with the most remaining energy as the new cluster leader, an attacker can continuously hijack the leadership by always claiming more remaining energy than anyone else in the cluster.

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Section: E Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The protocols developed in [3], [7], [4], [5], [6] do consider the security of cluster leader election. However, they have a number of limitations.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Resilient Cluster Leader Election for Wireless Sensor Networks

Dong

Liu

2009

2009 6th Annual IEEE Communications Society Conference on Sensor, Mesh and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks

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PAWN: a payload‐based mutual authentication scheme for wireless sensor networks

Jan

Nanda

Usman

et al. 2016

Concurrency and Computation

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Summary Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of resource‐starving miniature sensor nodes deployed in a remote and hostile environment. These networks operate on small batteries for days, months, and even years depending on the requirements of monitored applications. The battery‐powered operation and inaccessible human terrains make it practically infeasible to recharge the nodes unless some energy‐scavenging techniques are used. These networks experience threats at various layers and, as such, are vulnerable to a wide range of attacks. The resource‐constrained nature of sensor nodes, inaccessible human terrains, and error‐prone communication links make it obligatory to design lightweight but robust and secured schemes for these networks. In view of these limitations, we aim to design an extremely lightweight payload‐based mutual authentication scheme for a cluster‐based hierarchical WSN. The proposed scheme, also known as payload‐based mutual authentication for WSNs, operates in 2 steps. First, an optimal percentage of cluster heads is elected, authenticated, and allowed to communicate with neighboring nodes. Second, each cluster head, in a role of server, authenticates the nearby nodes for cluster formation. We validate our proposed scheme using various simulation metrics that outperform the existing schemes.

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DoS detection in WSNs: Energy‐efficient methods for selecting monitoring nodes

Monnet

Mokdad

Ballarini

et al. 2017

Concurrency and Computation

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Summary The use of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has increased rapidly over the last years. Due to their low resources, sensors come along with new issues regarding network security and energy consumption. Focusing on the network availability, previous studies proposed to protect clustered network against denial of service attacks with the use of traffic monitoring agents on some nodes. Those control nodes have to analyze the traffic inside a cluster and to send warnings to the cluster head whenever an abnormal behavior (e.g., high packets throughput or non‐retransmission of packets) is detected. But if the control nodes (cNodes) die out of exhaustion, they leave the network unprotected. To better fight against attacks, we try to enhance this solution by renewing periodically the election process. Furthermore, we propose three energy‐aware and secure methods to designate the cNodes in a hierarchically clustered WSN. The first one is a simple self‐election process where nodes randomly designate themselves. It leads to a better load balancing than a static method (i.e., with no renewal), but we argue that we can obtain better results by considering the remaining energy of the nodes at cNodes selection time. Hence, the second algorithm is purely based on the residual energy of the sensors. We discuss limitations of this deterministic process concerning security and cluster coverage and suggest workarounds. These improvements lead us to the third mechanism. It is based on residual energy too, but it includes a democratic election process in which nodes in the cluster vote to optimize the cNode role attribution. Results obtained from simulation experiments with the ns‐2 tool are provided to analyze the energy repartition in the network and to compare the three selection algorithms. All experimental outcomes show improvements of the load balancing in the network, while maintaining good detection coverage, in regard to static selection. Furthermore, the analysis of the respective performances of the three mechanisms is used as a basis to establish recommendations regarding the use cases of those methods. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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SecLEACH—On the security of clustered sensor networks

Cited by 109 publications

References 46 publications

Resilient Cluster Leader Election for Wireless Sensor Networks

Resilient Cluster Leader Election for Wireless Sensor Networks

PAWN: a payload‐based mutual authentication scheme for wireless sensor networks

DoS detection in WSNs: Energy‐efficient methods for selecting monitoring nodes

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