Replication attack detection with monitor nodes in clustered wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are often deployed in hostile environments where an adversary may physically capture some of the nodes in WSNs, and replicate them in a large number of clones, easily taking control of networks. A few solutions have been proposed to cope with this problem. However, these solutions cannot adapt to the change of the network size and have low detection efficiency for clone nodes. In order to discover the clone nodes fast, in this paper, we propose an improved LEACH (NI-LEACH) protocol to reduce the scale of the cluster by considering the residual energy of nodes and the optimal number of clusters. Furthermore, we design an intrusion detection algorithm to detect the replication attacks by introducing monitor nodes in the network so as to greatly reduce the occurrence of tampering with the information. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm is simple yet efficient. An attacker can be detected with high probability while achieving approximately optimal throughput. The network's ability against the attack from clone nodes is greatly improved.