Defending against search-based physical attacks in sensor networks

Abstract

In this paper we study the defense of sensor networks against search-based physical attacks. We define search-based physical attacks as those, where an attacker detects sensors using signal detecting equipment and then physically destroys the detected sensors. In this paper, we propose a sacrificial node-assisted approach to defend against search-based physical attacks. The core principle of our defense is to trade short term local coverage for long term global coverage through the sacrificial node-assisted attack notification and states switching of sensors. The performance metric we use is accumulative coverage (AC), which effectively captures coverage and lifetime of the sensor networks to measure sensor network performance. Our simulation results clearly demonstrate that our defense approach can significantly decrease losses in AC even under intense search-based physical attacks