An Efficient Defense Scheme against Selective Forwarding Attack in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks(WSN) has a wide range of applications in military and civilian domains. They are more prone to security attacks once deployed, as the nodes in the network are unattended and unprotected. Conventional security solutions are infeasible to WSN due to its limited battery and memory constraints. Selective Forwarding Attack is one among the many security threats in wireless sensor networks which can degrade network performance. An adversary on the transmission path selectively drop packet. The adversary same time transfer the packet, while in few occasions it drops the packet. It is difficult to detect this type of attack since the packet loss may be due to unreliable wireless communication. In this thesis, we proposed a defensive mechanism against selective forwarding attack. The proposed scheme is based on trust value of each node. During data transmission a node selects a downstream node that has highest trust value, which is updated dynamically based on the number of packets a node has forwarded and dropped. We compared our scheme with existing scheme and found that the packet loss in the proposed scheme is much less than the existing scheme.