Secure range-free localization scheme in Wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Localization in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has drawn growing attention from the researchers and a number of localization schemes have been proposed to discover the locations of regular sensors based on a few beacon nodes, which are assumed to know their locations through GPS or manual configuration. However, the localization process is vulnerable to malicious attacks aimed at interrupting the functionality of location-aware applications. The wormhole attack is a particularly challenging one since the external adversary which acts in passive mode, does not need to compromise any nodes or have access to any cryptographic keys. In this paper, wormhole attack in DV-hop is discussed, and a Wormhole-free DV-hop Localization scheme (WFDV) is proposed to defend wormhole attack in proactive countermeasure. Using analysis and simulation, we show that our solution is effective in detecting and defending against wormhole attacks with a high detection rate.