Detecting replicated nodes in Wireless Sensor Networks using random walks and network division

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks are vulnerable to node replication attacks due to deployment in unattended environments and the lack of physical tamper-resistance. An adversary can easily capture and compromise sensor nodes and after replicating them, he inserts arbitrary number of replicas into the network to mount a wide variety of internal attacks. In this paper we propose a novel distributed solution (RAND) for the detection of node replication attack in static WSNs which combines random walks with network division and works in two phases. In the first phase called network configuration phase, the entire network is divided into different areas. In the second phase called replica detection phase, the clone is detected by following a claimer-reporter-witness framework and a random walk is employed within each area for the selection of witness nodes. Simulation results show that our scheme outperforms the existing witness node based strategies with moderate communication and memory overhead.