Pro-Active Prevention of Clone Node Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Problem statement: Wireless mobile sensor networks are deploying large, self-organized and adaptable sets of sensors for many applications such as military, environmental, health care, remote monitoring and other applications. Unfortunately, the simplicity and low-cost of these sensors make eases cloning of compromised nodes by attackers in the network. Due to the unattended nature of wireless sensor networks, an adversary can capture and compromise sensor nodes, make replicas of them and then mount a variety of attacks with these clones. This cloning attack is the entry point for a large span of creepy attacks. In such attack, an adversary uses the credentials of a compromised node to introduce the replicas secretly into the network. These replicas are then used to launch a variety of attacks that challenge the sensor applications. Therefore the detection of node replication or called clone attacks in a wireless sensor network is a fundamental problem. Approach: These clone node attacks are highly dangerous because they allow the attacker to compromise a few nodes to exert control over much of the network. Several clone node detection schemes have been proposed in the literature to defend against such attacks in static sensor networks. A few distributed solutions to address this fundamental problem have been recently proposed. However, these solutions are not satisfactory in Pro-active context. First, they are energy and memory demanding: A serious drawback for any protocol to be used in the WSN-resource-constrained environment. Further, they are vulnerable to the specific adversary models introduced in this study. To overcome the above problems we propose the improved version of Randomized, Efficient and Distributed protocol named SRED-Secure, Randomized and Efficient and Distributed protocol. We show that our emergent algorithms represent a promising new approach to sensor network security by improving its trust aspects with the witness node. Results: The result of the experiments shows that not only the improvement levels of security aspects but also shows that the considerable amount of improvements in memory and time overheads. Conclusion: This method improves the security aspect of wireless sensor networks mainly in unattended environment and improves the real time data acquisition systems in future era."