Distributed actuation attacks in wireless sensor networks: implications and countermeasures

This paper investigates the loss of sensing fidelity in a wireless sensor network resulting from a proposed novel attack. The active attack is carried out by a distributed malicious sensor actuator network (mSAN) which is able to actuate or change sensed parameters of the surrounding environment under observation. We show how the attack effectively produces a denial of service on the sensing (DoSS) of a legitimate network, causing it to observe and record false intelligence about the environment. We demonstrate how a controlled level of random mobility in the network counters the attack under various deployments, network densities and actuation radii. We conclude that a random uniform distribution may be most resilient against these attacks and that a strictly deterministic grid deployment may be most vulnerable under certain circumstances. In general we note that in physically hostile environments where sensing fidelity is important, node location becomes as sensitive for dependability purposes as encryption information