A comprehensive security analysis of LEACH++ clustering protocol for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) will play a major role in future technologies in the development of the cyber-physical society. Studies show that WSNs are vulnerable to various insider attacks that may degrade its performance and affect the application services. Various intrusion detection system-based solutions have been proposed for WSNs to secure them from such attacks; however, these solutions have certain limitations with respect to completeness and evaluation. Recently, we proposed an intrusion detection framework to secure WSNs from insider attacks and proposed a protocol called LEACH++. In this paper, we perform a detailed security analysis of LEACH++ against black-hole, sink-hole and selective forwarding attacks by launching a number of attacks with different patterns. The results of our experiments performed in network simulator-2 show that the proposed scheme is highly efficient and achieves higher accuracy and detection rates with very low false-positive rate when compared to an anomaly based detection scheme.