Towards securing mintroute in wireless sensor networks

In a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), the sensor nodes rely upon a multi-hop routing protocol to relay their data to the base station. However, most WSN routing protocols are vulnerable to attacks in which a malicious node can disrupt the routes, drop, modify, or divert data away from the base station. In this paper, we use the ns-2 network simulator to demonstrate the vulnerability of the MintRoute protocol to link quality attacks by a malicious node. We then propose a novel "sequence number gap trick" as a lightweight means to test for and detect the presence of a malicious attacker. The simulation results show that judicious use of the sequence number gap trick provides robust detection of malicious nodes, preserving the data delivery capabilities of the WSN.