Random-walk based approach to detect clone attacks in wireless sensor networks

Abstract--Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) deployed in hostile environments are vulnerable to clone attacks. In such attack, an adversary compromises a few nodes, replicates them, and inserts arbitrary number of replicas into the network. Consequently, the adversary can carry out many internal attacks. Previous solutions on detecting clone attacks have several drawbacks. First, some of them require a central control, which introduces several inherent limits. Second, some of them are deterministic and vulnerable to simple witness compromising attacks. Third, in some solutions the adversary can easily learn the critical witness nodes to start smart attacks and protect replicas from being detected. In this paper, we first show that in order to avoid existing drawbacks, replica-detection protocols must be non-deterministic and fully distributed (NDFD), and fulfill three security requirements on witness selection. To our knowledge, only one existing protocol, Randomized Multicast, is NDFD an...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: JSAC
• Authors: Yingpei Zeng, Jiannong Cao, Shigeng Zhang, Shanqing Guo, Li Xie
• Keywords: JSAC 2010, Random Walks, Witness, Witness Selection