Hierarchical energy efficient intrusion detection system for black hole attacks in WSNs

Due to their particular characteristics, wireless sensor networks (WSN) are severely vulnerable to malicious attacks. Black hole is one of the most malicious attacks that target sensors routing protocols. This kind of attacks can have devastating impact on hierarchical routing protocols. Several security solutions have been proposed to secure WSNs from black hole attacks. However, most of these solutions are complex and energy inefficient. In this paper we propose a hierarchical energy efficient intrusion detection system, to protect sensor network from black hole attacks. Our approach is simple and based on control packets exchange between sensor node and base station. We have experimentally evaluated our system using the NS simulator to demonstrate its effectiveness in detecting and preventing efficiently the black hole attacks.