Detecting the Sybil Attack Cooperatively in Wireless Sensor Networks

Sybil attack is a network threat introduced by one or more malicious nodes to declare numerous illegal identifies to confuse or even collapse the network applications. A new detection mechanism, called CRSD, is proposed for static wireless sensor networks, which takes use of the received signal strength (RSS) to infer the distance between two identities and further determines the positions relation of the interesting identities by use of the RSS information from multiple neighbor nodes, e.g., via node cooperation. A Sybil attack is detected when two or more different identities have almost the same position. The analysis and simulation results show that, first, Sybil attack deteriorates the system performance significantly and second, CRSD can detect such attack in most cases, thus protecting the overall performance effectively.