Clone Node Detection Attacks and Mitigation Mechanisms in Static Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

The development of the wireless sensor networks technology commonly named WSNs has been gaining a significantly increased amount of attention from researchers over the last few decades. Its large number of sensor nodes is one of the features that makes it beneficial to the technology. The sensors can communicate with each other to form a network. These sensor nodes are generally used for diverse applications, such as pressure monitoring, fire detection, target tracking, and health monitoring, etc. However, the downside is that WSNs are often deployed in hostile, critical environments where they do not restrain physical access. This reality makes them incredibly vulnerable to clone node attacks or node replication attacks. The adversary can capture the legitimate sensor nodes, extract them and then collect some sensitive information, such as node ID, keys and perform a replication attack. This possibility will afterward facilitate the attacker to be able to take control of the whole network and execute the same functions as that of the authorized nodes. Based on this vulnerability, it is of great importance for researchers to invent a detection protocol for the clone attacks as well as a mitigation method. From all of the researches that have been published, a lot of them proposed some techniques to detect the clone node attacks and also to mitigate the attacks. However, almost none of them semantically focused on the security layer establishment. Based on this fact, we proposed an ontology-based approach Ontology for Replication Attacks in Static Wireless Sensor Networks “ORASWSN”, which can semantically be used for the detection and mitigation of the attacks by taking into consideration the importance of using security layers.