Formal specifications of Denial of Service attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

ABSTRACTWireless sensor network (WSN) contains the distributed autonomous devices with the sensing capability of physical and environmental conditions. During the clustering operation, the consumption of more energy causes the draining in battery power that leads to minimum network lifetime. Hence, the WSN devices are initially operated on low-power sleep mode to maximise the lifetime. But, the attacks arrival cause the disruption in low-power operating called denial of service (DoS) attacks. The conventional intrusion detection (ID) approaches such as rule-based and anomaly-based methods effectively detect the DoS attacks. But, the energy consumption and false detection rate are more. The absence of attack information and broadcast of its impact to the other cluster head (CH) leads to easy DoS attacks arrival. This article combines the isolation and routing tables to detect the attack in the specific cluster and broadcasts the information to other CH. The intercommunication between the CHs prevents the DoS attacks effectively. In addition, the swarm-based defence approach is proposed to migrate the fault channel to normal operating channel through frequency hop approaches. The comparative analysis between the proposed table-based intrusion detection systems (IDSs) and swarm-based defence approaches with the traditional IDS regarding the parameters of transmission overhead/efficiency, energy consumption, and false positive/negative rates proves the capability of DoS prediction/prevention in WSN.

In WSN, DoS (denial of service) attack makes shortcoming system. The packets travel over and over in the sensor network. By that, all the assets like data transmission, memory, and vitality are squandered by this attack. However, the attacker ought to optimize its attacker plan for request to boost the impact on the system performance because of the deficiency of vitality at the aggressor side. Denial of service (DoS) attack on the Internet has become a squeezing issue. By staying away from these sorts of attacks, network performance can be improved. Therefore, security is a fundamental requirement for these networks. Effective routing is necessary in order to overcome the issued faced by the crosslayer in the DOS attack of the WSN network for the purpose of good transmission. This research work mainly focuses on performance evaluation using optimization methods. To establish the efficient path in the crosslayer against DoS attack, this paper has proposed enhanced lion optimization with an efficient path routing equalization technique (LOEPRE). If any failure node occurs in the network, then the node is recognized and the transfer of the data packet is done to the other node. Retransmission of data causes overload in the network. The proposed model focuses on these issues and overcomes these issues by improving the path efficiently with robust security. It consists of three phases: the initial phase includes the route discovery in the network. In the second phase, the transfer of data is done in the high router path for security purposes. Finally, the efficient path routing equalization technique is used for minimizing the overload in the network; it provides the equalized path length in the network and is highly efficient. Hence, the proposed LOEPRE technique is used to achieve energy efficiency in wireless network for prolonged network lifetime and minimum packet latency and minimize consumption of energy. Moreover, the simulation outcome of the proposed LOEPRE method is highly robust while comparing to the existing methods EFCRS, SSPRA ELOER, EFLOR, and TSTP. It achieves better performance than existing algorithms in comparing metric connectivity ratio, end-to-end delay, overhead, throughput, and packet delivery ratio.

In ad-hoc and wireless networks, Denial of Service (DoS) attacks has always been problematic during data routing. DoS attacks disrupt the data routing and avert the generated data to reach the destination or the sink nodes. In tunnel attack, which is one of the type of DoS attacks, the intruder attracts all the traffic towards itself and prevent it from forwarding further to the neighboring nodes. Researchers have presented multiple solutions to cater the problem and minimize or avoid the tunnel attacks, but they all have their shortcomings. The main reason behind all the drawbacks is that those solutions have not been confirmed using formal methods. The formal methods can be utilized to authenticate whether or not the solutions are immune to DoS attacks. In our previous researches, it has been revealed that by employing formal methods, our newly developed protocol RAEED can detect and avoid many DoS attacks. In this research paper, it has been proved using model checker that RAEED can efficiently avoid both simple and intelligent tunnel attacks. Moreover, the results of formal methods have been confirmed with the help of computer simulations as well as practical implementation on MicaZ motes. In future we aim to employ formal methods to verify more wireless communication issues in multiple protocols.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been studied in depth for several decades. Their main role is to provide bridges between the virtual world of information technology and the real physical world. They promise unprecedented new abilities to observe and understand large-scale, real-world phenomena at a fine spatio-temporal resolution. However, this potential does not come for free; WSNs have been known to be vulnerable to several types of attacks aiming at compromising their security. Among these types, Denial of Service (DoS) attacks stand out, as most WSNs are vulnerable to such attacks, which affect the routing behavior. This paper introduces a simulation platform, based on the network simulator ns-2, that allows the in-depth study of DoS attacks against WSNs. We simulate and analyze the performance of routing protocols for WSNs using a scenario-based experiment, in order to analyze the network's behavior under all the simulated attacks, namely Blackhole, Flooding, Rushing and Selective Forwarding. The analysis involves several network characteristics and is aimed towards identifying easily measured features that can be used for efficiently detecting and classifying DoS attacks in WSNs.

Internet of Things (IoT) technology is getting more importance as many organizations from different sectors are moving toward adopting this technology. It introduces an efficient ways of collecting, processing and distributing data. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) play a vital role in the expanding growth of internet of things (IoT). However, DoS (denial-of-service) attacks are a major threat of WSNs. In this study, graph theory based model has been proposed to analyse the security of WSN under DoS attacks. The proposed model describes and assesses the security of WSN when it encounter DoS attacks by finding the attacks success probability, attack cost, attack impact, mean-time-to-compromise, attack risk and return-on-attack values. The impact of mitigation methods toward strengthening the WSN security has been described. smart home scenario WSN has been tacking as an example. The results showed that the capability of the proposed model to analysis the effects of DoS attacks in WSN. Also it showed the impact of mitigation methods in improving WSN security.

Denial of Services (DoS) attacks has long been a problem in ad-hoc and wireless networks during data routing. The aim of DoS attacks is to disrupt the routing and prevent data generated from the wireless source nodes to reach the sink or destination nodes. The sinkhole attack is a type of DoS in which the intruder attracts all the data traffic towards itself and does not forward it further. Although numerous solutions have been proposed to avoid sinkhole attack, they all have drawbacks. The main reason is that application of formal methods has not been utilized to confirm whether the solutions are immune from DoS attacks. We have earlier shown how formal modeling can be utilized efficiently to detect the vulnerabilities of existing routing protocols against DoS attacks. We also proposed a new protocol, RAEED (Robust formally Analysed protocol for wirEless sEnsor networks Deployment), which is able to address the problems of most DoS attacks. In this paper we have proved formally that RAEED can avoid Sinkhole attack. Finally computer simulations and practical implementation on McaZ motes have confirmed our results of formal methods.

A denial of service (DOS) attack is any malicious attempt to deprive legitimate customers of their ability to access services, such as a Web server. DOS attacks fall into two broad categories: • Server vulnerability DOS attacks — attacks that exploit known bugs in operating systems and servers. These attacks typically will use the bugs to crash programs that users routinely rely upon, thereby depriving those users of their normal access to the services provided by those programs. Examples of vulnerable systems include all operating systems, such as Windows NT or Linux, and various Internet-based services such as DNS, Microsoft's IIS Servers, Web servers, etc. All of these programs, which have important and useful purposes, also have bugs that hackers exploit to bring them down or hack into them. This kind of DOS attack usually comes from a single location and searches for a known vulnerability in one of the programs it is targeting. Once it finds such a program, the DOS attack will attempt to crash the program to deny service to other users. Such an attack does not require high bandwidth. • Packet flooding DOS attacks — attacks that exploit weaknesses in the Internet infrastructure and its protocols. Floods of seemingly normal packets are used to overwhelm the processing resources of programs, thereby denying users the ability to use those services. Unlike the previous category of DOS attacks, which exploit bugs, flood attacks require high bandwidth in order to succeed. Rather than use the attacker's own infrastructure to mount the attack (which might be easier to detect), the attacker is increasingly likely to carry out attacks through intermediary computers (called zombies) that the attacker has earlier broken into. Zombies are coordinated by the hacker at a later time to launch a distributed DOS (DDOS) attack on a victim. Such attacks are extremely difficult to trace and defend with the present-day Internet. Most zombies come from home computers, universities, and other vulnerable infrastructures. Often, the owners of the computers are not even aware that their machines are being co- opted in such attacks. The hacker community has invented numerous scripts to make it convenient for those interested in mounting such attacks to set up and orchestrate the zombies. Many references are available on this topic.1–4

Due to broadcast transmission and unattended nature, and hostile environments a variety of denial of service (DoS) attacks are possible in both Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and ad-hoc networks. We have developed a formal framework which can automatically verify different wireless routing protocols against DoS attacks exhaustively. In this paper we apply our formal framework against a secure ad-hoc routing protocol ARAN, which employs public cryptographic signatures as a defense against attacks. Our framework confirmed that ARAN is still vulnerable to different DoS attacks such as black hole, INA and wormhole. The framework also traces back the reason(s) as to why and how the attacks were successful.

Denial of Service (DoS) attacks can be easily launched in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Due to their resource constraints, namely limited energy, memory and bandwidth, WSNs are especially vulnerable to DoS attacks. This paper addresses a particular class of DoS attacks that overwhelm resources along a multihop data delivery path. Since WSNs are typically tree-structured, then a DoS attack on a path will be especially effective in denying routing service to an entire branch of sensor nodes, not just the nodes along the path. This paper proposes a solution using one-way hash chains to protect end-to-end multihop communications in WSNs against such Path-based DoS (PDoS) attacks. The proposed solution is lightweight, tolerates bursty packet losses and can easily be implemented in modern WSNs. This paper reports on performance measured from a prototype implementation.

The wide-spread deployment of wireless sensor networks (WSN) promises extensive applications in military and civilian fields. So far the major research focus has been to make WSN more useful and scalable in order to cope with future challenges of communication technologies, small emphasis is placed till now for the secure communication in WSN. A lot number of WSN protocols exist that have been designed to figure out the weaknesses and to provide feasible solutions concerning the security, Denial of service (DoS) attacks, data routing, data dissemination and power consumption. Our research work have analyzed a variety of key distribution and sharing protocols designed to detect and avoid DoS attacks in WSN. We propose a security protocol, modified form of identifier based protocol, for prevention of denial of service attack in WSN that provides a solution to battery exhaustion of sensor network by disseminating the identity of a malicious node.

Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) are important tools to detect malicious network traffic. Particularly, the efficient detection of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks poses a challenging issue especially in Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios composed of resource-constrained devices, as Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). Additionally, machine learning classification methods have been presented as a prominent approach to DoS detection. However, a lack of a suitable and careful assessment of such methods becomes difficult to understand the real contribution of them to improve the detection of DoS attacks in WSNs. This work aiming at assessing the efficiency of machine learning classification approaches to detect (i) flooding, (ii) gray hole, and (iii) black hole DoS attacks in WSNs. Our evaluation is based on a WSN-based dataset, called WSN-DS, considering the accuracy and speediness metrics. Results reveal that—considering accuracy and speediness simultaneously—J48 method is recommended for detecting gray hole and black hole attacks, whereas the Random Tree method is the best option for flooding detection. Regarding the speediness, the J48 method is the fastest consuming 0.54µs of processing on average per sample.

To measure the degree of basic service of wireless sensor network (WSN) with denial of service (DoS) attacks, it is necessary to evaluate survivability of WSN. This paper presents new method based on services and Markov Chain. It distinguishes services, analyzes influence of services under DoS attacks, gets the formula of survivability. Probability of states is obtained by markov chain, then the quantitive survivability is getted in different states. Simulations prove that DoS attacks obviously decrease the survivability of WSN, but adding node energy and improving node density in certain range can reduce the influence of DoS attacks.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is a network of sensors, actuators, mobile and wearable devices that have processing and communication modules to monitor physical and environmental conditions. Currently millions of these type of smart devices serving in many fields like military, environment, and health services. Due to their unique deployment places even in hostile territories WSN are subject to various kinds of attacks. Self configuration, autonomous device addition, network connection and resource limitation are the main features of WSN that makes it highly prone to network attacks. Denial of Service (DoS) attacks which targets the availability of a WSN system is one of the most potent threat to which a WSN must be resilient in order to continue operations. This studies aim to analyze and classify the WSN DoS threats and their countermeasures. Based on the survey we present the best approach to designing a WSN resilient against DoS attacks.

In diverse areas, the wireless sensor network (WSN) has an important role to play and has its application in various domains. Even though WSN has become very popular in recent times but is also vulnerable to several security threats. The Denial of Service (DoS) attacks and their variant, Distributed Denial of Services (DDoS) attacks are the most commonly observed attacks in WSN. The DoS attacks can hamper the normal functioning of a WSN by repeatedly flooding the communication channel of a sensor node with request messages by attackers to deprive the network of essential services and applications. Therefore, robust techniques to detect DoS attacks in WSNs need to be developed and investigated. Attack detection schemes using machine learning techniques will be a highly promising area of research. A review of several DoS attack detection schemes in WSN using machine learning has been reviewed and presented in the paper.

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a major catalyst in the advancement of the computer networks. WSN is used in outdoor applications like environmental monitoring and military surveillance. These open environments cause WSN to be more vulnerable to various wireless hackinglike spoofing jamming and broadcast attack. Securinga WSN from these attacks is a challenging task. Denial of Service (DoS) attack is one of the major security attacks in WSN. Jamming a single or cluster of nodes is a type of DoS attack on WSN. In this paper, a novel approach in detecting the physical layer DoS style jamming attack is proposed and analyzed. Here, we propose a method called physical layer jamming identification. This method is based on residual energy where few nodes are marked as monitor nodes. These nodes monitor the jamming attack by checking the Receiver Signal Strength Indicator and packet delivery ratio values of other nodes. It improves system performance and increases packet deliver ratio.