A Novel Sybil Attack Detection and Prevention Mechanism for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Security is the main concern for wireless sensor nodes and exposed against malicious attacks. To secure the communication between sensor nodes several key managing arrangements are already implemented. The key managing method for any protected application must minimally deliver safety facilities such as truthfulness. Diffie–Hellman key exchange in the absence of authentication is exposed to MITM (man-in-the-middle) attacks due to which the attacker node can easily interrupt the communication, by appearing as a valid node in the network. In wireless sensor networks, single path routing is very common but it suffers with the two problems i:e link failure which results in data loss and if any node in single path is compromised, there is no alternative to send the data to the destination securely. To overcome this problem, multipath routing protocol is used which provides both availability and consistency of data. AOMDV (Ad-hoc On-demand Multipath Distance Vector Routing Protocol) is used in a proposed algorithm which provides alternative paths to reach the data packets to the destination. This paper presents an algorithm DH-SAM (Diffie-Hellman- Sybil Attack Mitigation) to spot and mitigate Sybil nodes and make the network trusted with the objective of solving the issue of MITM attack in the network. After node authentication, secure keys are established between two communicating nodes for data transmission using the Diffie-Hellman algorithm. Performance evaluation of DH-SAM is done by using different metrics such as detection rate, PDR, throughput, and average end to end (AE2E) delay.