Distributed Detection of Clone Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are often deployed in hostile environments where an adversary can physically capture some of the nodes, first can reprogram, and then, can replicate them in a large number of clones, easily taking control over the network. A few distributed solutions to address this fundamental problem have been recently proposed. However, these solutions are not satisfactory. First, they are energy and memory demanding: A serious drawback for any protocol to be used in the WSN-resource-constrained environment. Further, they are vulnerable to the specific adversary models introduced in this paper. The contributions of this work are threefold. First, we analyze the desirable properties of a distributed mechanism for the detection of node replication attacks. Second, we show that the known solutions for this problem do not completely meet our requirements. Third, we propose a new self-healing, Randomized, Efficient, and Distributed (RED) protocol for the detection of node replication attacks, and we show that it satisfies the introduced requirements. Finally, extensive simulations show that our protocol is highly efficient in communication, memory, and computation; is much more effective than competing solutions in the literature; and is resistant to the new kind of attacks introduced in this paper, while other solutions are not.