Node replica detection in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

In various applications of wireless sensor network, nodes are mostly deployed unattended and unsupervised in hostile environment. They are exposed to various kinds of security threat, and node replication attack is one among them. In this attack, an adversary captures a legitimate node from the network. Then, she creates a number of clones of the original node, and deploys them back into the network.
The adversary can gain control of various network activities and launch other insider attacks using these replicas. Most of the replica detection schemes reported in the literature are centralized and location dependent. Centralized schemes are vulnerable to a single point of failure. Forwarding location information incurs additional
overhead in location dependent schemes. Most replica detection schemes require exchange of membership information
among nodes. To reduce communication overhead we propose two techniques called transpose bit-pair coding (TBC), and sub-mat coding (SMC) for efficient exchange of group membership information among the nodes in wireless sensor network. These schemes are lossless and do not generate false positive. Next, we propose two replica detection schemes for static wireless sensor networks called zone-based node replica detection (ZBNRD), and node coloring based replica detection (NCBRD). In ZBNRD, nodes are divided into a number of zones. Each zone has a zone-leader, who is responsible for detecting replica. ZBNRD is compared with a few existing schemes such as LSM, P-MPC, SET and RED. It is observed that ZBNRD has higher detec-tion probability and lower communication cost. In NCBRD, each node is assigned with a color (value), which is unique within its neighborhood. A color conflict within the neighborhood of a node is detected as a replica. The performance of NCBRD is compared with LSM, SET, and RED. It is found that NCBRD has higher detection probability than the above schemes and lower communication overhead than LSM and RED. The techniques for replica detection in static wireless sensor networks cannot be applied to mobile wireless sensor networks (MWSN) because of nodes mobility. We propose a technique called energy based replica detection (EBRD) for MWSN. In EBRD, the residual energy of a node is used to detect replicas. Each node in the network monitors and is monitored by a set of nodes. Conflict in the timestamp-residual energy pair of a node is detected as replica. EBRD is compared with two existing schemes EDD, and MTLSD. It is found that EBRD has excellent detection probability in comparison to EDD and MTLSD, and the communication overhead of EBRD is higher than EDD and lower than MTLSD. Simulations were performed using Castalia simulator.