A Security Method for Multiple Attacks in Sensor Networks: Against False-Report Injection, False-Vote Injection and Wormhole Attacks

Abstract

In a large-scale wireless sensor network, damage spreads rapidly in the network when under false report injection, false votes injection, or wormhole attacks. These attacks cause finite energy resources to be drained, legitimate reports to be dropped, and data to be intercepted by adversary nodes. A probabilistic voting-based filtering scheme (PVFS) and localized encryption and authentication protocol (LEAP) can be used to cope with these attacks. When multiple attacks occur simultaneously, PVFS and LEAP should be operated together. But the concurrent application of PVFS and LEAP provides inefficient duplications of operations in the sensor network. In this paper, we propose a security method which improves the energy efficiency while maintaining the security level of applying PVFS and LEAP simultaneously. The proposed method was designed by identifying and eliminating the redundancies of employing both methods together and providing more efficient functionalities. Four types of new keys were also designed for simultaneous detection of multiple attacks. We evaluated the effectiveness of the proposed method compared to simply applying PVFS and LEAP simultaneously when under multiple attacks. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method saves energy by up to 11% while maintaining detection power.