Detection of HELLO flood attack on LEACH protocol

Various WSN applications use hierarchical routing protocol for routing sensed data to the sink. LEACH is one of the widely used hierarchical, distributed clustering protocol in WSN. In LEACH, Non-Cluster head Nodes decide to join a cluster head based on Received Signal Strength (RSS) of receiving HELLO packets from CHs making it vulnerable to HELLO Flood attack. A laptop-class adversary node can broadcast packets advertising it as cluster head with higher signal strength, all sensor nodes will select it as cluster head and send join packet into it, thinking that the adversary is in their range and thus, the whole network will be in a state of confusion. Existing solutions for detection of HELLO flood attack are either cryptographic which are less suitable in terms of memory and battery power, or non-cryptographic which involves sending the test packet for detection. This increases communication overhead as the energy required for transmission of the packet is far more than the energy required for processing/calculation. Based on these facts, a non-cryptographic solution for HELLO flood attack detection is proposed in this paper in which the no. of times the test packet is transmitted is greatly reduced. The simulation results showed detection of adversary nodes with minimal communication overhead as the number of test packets sent for detection is reduced from 20-35 to 10-14 (approx.).