A Low Power Cyber-Attack Detection and Isolation Mechanism for Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are effective tools in many mission-critical applications, such as health care, defence applications, Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), smart grid and industrial condition monitoring. Low power consumption is the main attractive feature of WSNs, hence, protocols and algorithms implemented in WSNs should always maintain low power operation. Cybersecurity of WSNs in mission- critical applications is one of the major design aspects of these networks. However, implementing security mechanisms in WSNs is a challenging task due to the limited computation and power resources of the sensor nodes. Therefore, WSN security mechanisms should not only focus on maintaining high reliability and throughput needed by mission- critical applications, but also should maintain low power operation. In this paper, we develop a low power WSN cybersecurity mechanism suitable for mission-critical applications. Our mechanism can detect and isolate various attacks, such as denial of sleep, forge and replay attacks in an energy efficient way. Simulation results show that our mechanism can outperform existing techniques in terms of power consumption and reliability.