Optimised watchdog system for detection of DDOS and wormhole attacks in IEEE802.15.4-based wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Owing to wireless broadcast nature of communication, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are vulnerable to denial-of-service (DOS) attacks and hole attacks. Preserving security and confidentiality in WSN are crucial, so it is required to design an energy efficient intruder detection system (IDS) to detect and mitigate the attacks. In this paper, an energy efficient intruder detection system based on energy prediction (EE-IDSEP) has been proposed for IEEE 802.15.4-based WSN to detect and mitigate the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack (i.e., resource depletion attack, power exhaustion attack and flooding) and wormhole attacks. The design of EE-IDSEP consists of optimised watchdog system and hidden Markov model (HMM). The wormhole attack is detected using the optimised watchdog system. The optimised watchdog mechanism is a trust-based method which is used to evaluate the validity of all the nodes of the network. The DDoS attack is detected based on energy consumed using the hidden Markov model. The model of EE-IDS is simulated using NS2 simulator and then it is compared with existing energy efficient trust system (EE-TS) in terms of packet delivery ratio (PDR), packet drop, and energy consumption.