Defend against topological attacks in sensor networks

Abstract

Sensor networks are vulnerable to many active attacks due to the defects of the network protocols that are not designed carefully to involve security defenses at the beginning. Most of the attacks try to cause topological distortion by spoofing or replaying routing information. This paper proposes to use a location-based naming (LBN) mechanism for sensor nodes, in which location information is embedded into node identifier and acts as an inherent node characteristic to provide authentication service in local access control. When LBN is enforced, the impacts of many attacks to sensor network topology can be limited in a small area. A link layer authentication (LLA) scheme is also proposed to further decrease the impacts of those attacks. Our LBN and LLA can be combined and act as an efficient solution against a wide range of topological attacks in sensor networks