Five Basic Types of Insider DoS Attacks of Code Dissemination in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Code dissemination is one of the important services of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Securing the process of code dissemination is essential in some certain WSNs applications, state-of-the-art secure code dissemination protocols for WSNs aim for the efficient source authentication and integrity verification of code image, however, due to the resource constrains of WSNs and the epidemic behavior of the code dissemination system, existing secure code dissemination protocols are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS) attacks when sensor nodes can be compromised (insider DoS attacks). In this paper, we identify five different basic types of DoS attacks exploiting the epidemic propagation strategies used by Deluge. They are (1) Higher-version Advertisement attack, (2) False Request attack, (3) Larger-numbered Page attack, (4) Lower-version Adv attack, and (5) Same-version Adv attack. Simulation shows these susceptibilities caused by above insider DoS attacks. Some simple models are also proposed which promote understanding the problem of insider DoS attacks and attempt to quantify the severity of these attacks in the course of code dissemination in WSNs.