Protecting an WSN from internal attack based on epistemic uncertainties

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are composed of a large number of low cost and low power, multifunctional sensor nodes communicating at short distance. These sensor nodes are densely deployed to collect and transmit data from physical world to one or more destination nodes called “sink” in an autonomous way. They have been making up of a mass of spatially distributed autonomous sensors to monitor physical or environmental conditions, such as water contamination, sound, temperature, motion, pressure, and other pollutants. However, security threats to WSNs become serious challenges due to their open nature of the wireless medium. For example, an adversary can easily eavesdrop and replay or inject fabricated messages. Traditional different cryptographic methods can be used to defend against some of such attacks but now very limited. Node compromised is another major problem for WSN security as it allows an adversary to enter inside the security perimeter of the network, called internal attack, which raised more serious challenge to WSNs due to its nature. In this paper, we are focusing on investigating internal attacks of wireless sensor networks with multi-hop and single sinker. The epistemic uncertainty theory is introduced and it is to be shown that our novel algorithm works with controllable resiliency of wireless sensor networks, based on Dempster-Shafer theory (DST). It is to ensure the targeted WSN working at the designed resiliency level with our algorithm.