Fuzzy Logic-Based Decision Making for Detecting Distributed Node Exhaustion Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Recent advances in the field of wireless networks have entailed collateral growth in the number of possible malicious attacks against them. A significant amount of work has been done towards ensuring security of a class of such networks, namely, Wireless Sensor Networks. Considering the untrusted environments of operations of such networks, the threat of distributed attacks against constrained resources i.e. sensor power, computation and communication capabilities cannot be overlooked. In [1], we modeled a class of attack called a distributed denial of service attack in such networks, and proposed a pattern-based scheme to detect such attacks. The limitation of this proposed scheme was on the lack of a tradeoff mechanism between improved performance of the detection scheme (higher detection rates) and corresponding increase in the use of the energy resources of the sensor nodes participating in the detection process. In this paper, we propose a fuzzy logic-based approach towards achieving demarkation in the values of specific parameters of the detection scheme, so as to ascertain a reasonable tradeoff between attack detection and node energy utilization. Simulation results depict the use of a fuzzy-based approach for addressing the energy-detection rate tradeoff problem effectively.