A randomized, efficient, and distributed protocol for the detection of node replication attacks in wireless sensor networks

ABSTRACT

Wireless sensor networks are often deployed in hostile environments, where anadversary can physically capture some of the nodes. Once a node is captured, the attackercan re-program it and replicate the node in a large number of clones, thus easily taking over the network. The detection of node replication attacks in a wireless sensor network is therefore a fundamental problem. A few distributed solutions have recently been proposed. However, these solutions are not satisfactory. First, they are energy and memory demanding: A serious drawback for any protocol that is to be used in resource constrained environment such as a sensor network. Further, they are vulnerable to specific adversary models introduced in this paper.

The contributions of this work are threefold. First, we analyze the desirable properties of a distributed mechanism for the detection of node replication attacks. Second, we show that the known solutions for this problem do not completely meet our requirements. Third, we propose a new Randomized, Efficient, and Distributed (RED) protocol for the detection of node replication attacks and we show that it is completely satisfactory with respect to the requirements. Extensive simulations also show that our protocol is highly efficient in communication, memory, and computation, that it sets out an improved attack detection probability compared to the best solutions in the literature, and that it is resistant to the new kind of attacks we introduce in this paper, while other solutions are not.

REFERENCES

• 1: I. F. Akyildiz , W. Su , Y. Sankarasubramaniam , E. Cayirci, Wireless sensor networks: a survey, Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking, v.38 n.4, p.393-422, 15 March 2002 [doi>10.1016/S1389-1286(01)00302-4]
• 2: A. Becher, Z. Benenson, and M. Dornseif. Tampering with motes: Real-world physical attacks on wireless sensor networks. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Security in Pervasive Computing (SPC), pages 104--118, 2006.
• 3: Christian Bettstetter, On the minimum node degree and connectivity of a wireless multihop network, Proceedings of the 3rd ACM international symposium on Mobile ad hoc networking & computing, June 09-11, 2002, Lausanne, Switzerland [doi>10.1145/513800.513811]
• 4: Christian Bettstetter , Christian Hartmann, Connectivity of wireless multihop networks in a shadow fading environment, Proceedings of the 6th ACM international workshop on Modeling analysis and simulation of wireless and mobile systems, September 19-19, 2003, San Diego, CA, USA [doi>10.1145/940991.940998]
• 5: S. Capkun and J.-P. Hubaux. Secure positioning of wireless devices with application to sensor networks. In INFOCOM, pages 1917--1928, 2005.
• 6: A. Caruso, A. Urpi, S. Chessa, and S. De. Gps-free coordinate assignment and routing in wireless sensor networks. In Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM '05, pages 150--160, 2005.
• 7: Haowen Chan , Adrian Perrig , Dawn Song, Random Key Predistribution Schemes for Sensor Networks, Proceedings of the 2003 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, p.197, May 11-14, 2003
• 8: Gilbert Chen , Joel W. Branch , Boleslaw K. Szymanski, Local Leader Election, Signal Strength Aware Flooding, and Routeless Routing, Proceedings of the 19th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS'05) - Workshop 12, p.244.1, April 04-08, 2005 [doi>10.1109/IPDPS.2005.269]
• 9: Clifford Cocks, An Identity Based Encryption Scheme Based on Quadratic Residues, Proceedings of the 8th IMA International Conference on Cryptography and Coding, p.360-363, December 17-19, 2001
• 10: Mauro Conti , Roberto Di Pietro , Luigi V. Mancini, Secure Cooperative Channel Establishment inWireless Sensor Networks, Proceedings of the 4th annual IEEE international conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops, p.327, March 13-17, 2006 [doi>10.1109/PERCOMW.2006.121]
• 11: M. Conti, R. Di Pietro, and L. V. Mancini. Ecce: Enhanced cooperative channel establishment for secure pair-wise communication in wireless sensor networks. Ad Hoc Networks, 5(1):49--62, 2007.
• 12: M. Conti, R. Di Pietro, L. V. Mancini, and A. Mei. Requirements and open issues in distributed detection of node identity replicas in wsn. In Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC '06), Special Session on Wireless Sensor Networks, page 66, 2006.
• 13: Budhaditya Deb , Sudeept Bhatnagar , Badri Nath, ReInForM: Reliable Information Forwarding Using Multiple Paths in Sensor Networks, Proceedings of the 28th Annual IEEE International Conference on Local Computer Networks, p.406, October 20-24, 2003
• 14: Murat Demirbas , Youngwhan Song, An RSSI-based Scheme for Sybil Attack Detection in Wireless Sensor Networks, Proceedings of the 2006 International Symposium on on World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks, p.564-570, June 26-29, 2006 [doi>10.1109/WOWMOM.2006.27]
• 15: Roberto Di Pietro , Luigi V. Mancini , Alessandro Mei, Energy efficient node-to-node authentication and communication confidentiality in wireless sensor networks, Wireless Networks, v.12 n.6, p.709-721, November 2006 [doi>10.1007/s11276-006-6530-5]
• 16: Roberto Di Pietro , Luigi V. Mancini , Alessandro Mei , Alessandro Panconesi , Jaikumar Radhakrishnan, Connectivity properties of secure wireless sensor networks, Proceedings of the 2nd ACM workshop on Security of ad hoc and sensor networks, October 25-25, 2004, Washington DC, USA [doi>10.1145/1029102.1029112]
• 17: R. Di Pietro, L. V. Mancini, A. Mei, A. Panconesi, and J. Radhakrishnan. Sensor networks that are provably resilient. In Proceedings of IEEE 2nd International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks (SecureComm 2006), to appear.
• 18: John R. Douceur, The Sybil Attack, Revised Papers from the First International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems, p.251-260, March 07-08, 2002
• 19: Jeremy Elson , Deborah Estrin, Time Synchronization for Wireless Sensor Networks, Proceedings of the 15th International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium, p.186, April 23-27, 2001
• 20: Jeremy Elson , Lewis Girod , Deborah Estrin, Fine-grained network time synchronization using reference broadcasts, ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, v.36 n.SI, Winter 2002 [doi>10.1145/844128.844143]
• 21: Laurent Eschenauer , Virgil D. Gligor, A key-management scheme for distributed sensor networks, Proceedings of the 9th ACM conference on Computer and communications security, November 18-22, 2002, Washington, DC, USA [doi>10.1145/586110.586117]
• 22: Deepak Ganesan , Ramesh Govindan , Scott Shenker , Deborah Estrin, Highly-resilient, energy-efficient multipath routing in wireless sensor networks, ACM SIGMOBILE Mobile Computing and Communications Review, v.5 n.4, October 2001 [doi>10.1145/509506.509514]
• 23: Virgil D. Gligor, Emergent properties in ad-hoc networks: a security perspective, Proceedings of the 4th ACM workshop on Wireless security, p.55, September 02-02, 2005, Cologne, Germany [doi>10.1145/1080793.1080795]
• 24: Y. C. Hu, A. Perrig, and D. B. Johnson. Packet leashes: a defense against wormhole attacks in wireless networks. In INFOCOM 2003. Twenty-Second Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies. IEEE, pages 1976--1986, 2003.
• 25: C. Karlof and D. Wagner. Secure routing in wireless sensor networks: attacks and countermeasures. Ad Hoc Networks, 1(2-3):293--315, 2003.
• 26: Brad Karp , H. T. Kung, GPSR: greedy perimeter stateless routing for wireless networks, Proceedings of the 6th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking, p.243-254, August 06-11, 2000, Boston, Massachusetts, United States [doi>10.1145/345910.345953]
• 27: J. Kong, H. Luo, K. Xu, D. L. Gu, M. Gerla, and S. Lu. Adaptive Security for Multi-layer ad hoc Networks. Special Issue of Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing, Wiley Interscience Press, 2002.
• 28: Alfred J. Menezes , Scott A. Vanstone , Paul C. Van Oorschot, Handbook of Applied Cryptography, CRC Press, Inc., Boca Raton, FL, 1996
• 29: James Newsome , Elaine Shi , Dawn Song , Adrian Perrig, The sybil attack in sensor networks: analysis & defenses, Proceedings of the third international symposium on Information processing in sensor networks, April 26-27, 2004, Berkeley, California, USA [doi>10.1145/984622.984660]
• 30: James Newsome , Dawn Song, GEM: Graph EMbedding for routing and data-centric storage in sensor networks without geographic information, Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems, November 05-07, 2003, Los Angeles, California, USA [doi>10.1145/958491.958501]
• 31: Bryan Parno , Adrian Perrig , Virgil Gligor, Distributed Detection of Node Replication Attacks in Sensor Networks, Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, p.49-63, May 08-11, 2005 [doi>10.1109/SP.2005.8]
• 32: Adi Shamir, Identity-based cryptosystems and signature schemes, Proceedings of CRYPTO 84 on Advances in cryptology, p.47-53, August 1985, Santa Barbara, California, United States
• 33: Arvinderpal S. Wander , Nils Gura , Hans Eberle , Vipul Gupta , Sheueling Chang Shantz, Energy Analysis of Public-Key Cryptography for Wireless Sensor Networks, Proceedings of the Third IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications, p.324-328, March 08-12, 2005 [doi>10.1109/PERCOM.2005.18]
• 34: Yi Yang , Xinran Wang , Sencun Zhu , Guohong Cao, SDAP: a secure hop-by-Hop data aggregation protocol for sensor networks, Proceedings of the 7th ACM international symposium on Mobile ad hoc networking and computing, May 22-25, 2006, Florence, Italy [doi>10.1145/1132905.1132944]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.0 General
          Subjects: Security and protection (e.g., firewalls)

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.1 Network Architecture and Design
          Subjects: Wireless communication

General Terms:
Performance, Security

Keywords:
distributed protocol, efficiency, node replication attack detection, resilience, wireless sensor networks security