Data tampering attacks diagnosis in dynamic wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Real-world wireless sensor networks (WSNs) usually have dynamic topologies and are vulnerable to data tampering attacks, which may possibly lead to serious consequences. This paper addresses the issue of defending against data tampering attacks to dynamic WSNs. First, a hybrid diagnosis algorithm is proposed, which consists of three phases: data comparison phase, distributed diagnosis phase, and global diagnosis phase. In the distributed diagnosis phase, a majority voting mechanism and a multi-round diagnosis mechanism are introduced. As the phase may lead to inconsistent diagnosis results among different sensor nodes, we introduce a global diagnosis phase to overcome the shortcoming. Next, we evaluate the performance of the diagnosis algorithm, accompanied with a few examples. Finally, to achieve near perfect performance, some experiments on how to choose the parameters of the algorithm are provided. This work provides guidance for dealing with data tampering attacks in dynamic WSNs.