DSF - A Distributed Security Framework for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have many applications that handle sensitive information such as surveillance, reconnaissance, and target tracking. Therefore, a WSN deployed in a hostile region should be resilient to attacks. The current approach to defending against malicious threats is to develop and deploy a specific defense mechanism for a specific attack. However, the problem with this traditional approach to defending sensor networks is that the solution for the jamming attack does not defend against other attacks (e.g., sybil, selective forwarding, and wormhole attacks). In reality, one cannot know a priori what type of attack an adversary will launch. Also, given the resource constraints of sensor nodes, the current defense mechanisms cannot be simply combined on the node to provide a complete solution. This work addresses the challenges with the traditional approach to securing sensor networks and presents a collaborative framework (the Distributed Security Framework -DSF) that can defend against all known attacks. The framework is extensible, therefore, as new attacks are discovered they can also be defended against. The DSF leverages existing defense mechanisms created by researchers. These defense mechanisms are distributed in such a way that they can, collectively, provide comprehensive defense to the network. The efficacy of the DSF is determined using simulations for scenarios consisting of multiple stationary and multiple mobile attackers. The simulation results show that though the DSF consumes more energy than single defense schemes, it can significantly enhance the network security even when the network is under multiple types of attacks.