Protection against Byzantine attacks on Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks are vulnerable to many different kind of attacks. Especially insider attacks known as Byzantine attacks are very harmful and is not easy to defend a wireless sensor network against such attacks. The problem is that insider attacks are much easier to perform in sensor networks than in classical computer networks. The presented concept of a cluster-based sensor network is based on cluster heads equipped with data diodes and can be used to prevent Byzantine attacks. To reduce the impact of cluster head tampering a security mechanism based on the Byzantine Generals's Problem will be introduced. Finally, details concerning our implementation of cluster nodes on low-power FPGA are given.