Timing control for protecting from internal attacks in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are widely used due to they are easy and rapid deployed, low cost, low power, self-organized, cooperatively collect the environmental information and realize the integration of the physical world and communication network. It is the fact that due to open nature of the wireless medium an adversary can easily eavesdrop and replay or inject fabricated messages. Different cryptographic methods can be used to defend against some of such attacks. However, node compromise is another major problem of WSN security as it allows an adversary to enter inside the security perimeter of the network, which raised a serious challenge for WSNs. This paper is focusing on investigating internal attacks of wireless sensor networks, by which we show our novel method will work well for the security under some fixed parameters designed by the network designer, we also have reasonable model for predicting the highest signal noise ratio (S/N). “Timing control” method is to be used for protecting internal attacks in SWNs. Therefore we may allow a sinker to be open only around a particular time period to receive the signals from the sources while the other time slots are in “sleeping state” to ignore any signals, including the internal attacking signal. In particularly, we found the highest S/N timing can be controlled by the sending rating for a fixed network. We can easily manipulate the sending rate to control the time when the highest S/N is occurring to protect from “internal attacks.” The simulation results have been shown and they underpinned our novel algorithm.