Title: Per node deployment based detection of controlled link establishment attack in distributed sensor networks

Authors: Thanh Dai Tran, Johnson I. Agbinya, Adel Ali Al-Jumaily

Addresses: Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, University of Technology, Sydney, 15 Broadway, NSW 2007, Australia. ' Department of Electronic Engineering, School of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, Faculty of Science, Technology and Engineering, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Victoria 3086, Australia. ' Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, University of Technology, Sydney, 15 Broadway, NSW 2007, Australia

Abstract: The great majority of processes in distributed sensor networks can only be accomplished via collaborative efforts of sensor nodes. However, the success of these processes is undermined by an attack termed controlled link establishment attack exemplified by node replication attack and key-swapping collusion attack based on their final attack goal. Countermeasures against the two latter attacks can be utilised as remedies for the controlled link establishment attack. Nevertheless, each of such countermeasures exposes its own limitations. In this paper, we propose a series of evolutionary schemes to overcome those limitations. The first two schemes are designed to be lightweight in performance at the cost of slightly weaker security robustness while the final scheme obtains much greater security by trading off small performance. Theoretical analyses, simulations, and extensive comparison with other schemes have been conducted to demonstrate the plausibility of our schemes with respect to security features and performance overheads.

Keywords: controlled links; secure link establishment; controlled nodes; node compromise; collusion attacks; attack detection; countermeasures; network security; distributed sensor networks; node replication attacks; wireless sensor networks; WSNs; wireless networks.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSNET.2011.040240

International Journal of Sensor Networks, 2011 Vol.9 No.3/4, pp.192 - 208

Received: 01 Feb 2010
Accepted: 05 Aug 2010
Published online: 22 May 2011 *

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