Distributed Detection in the Presence of Byzantine Attack in Large Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are vulnerable to Byzantine attacks in which a fraction of sensors are tampered. The intruder can reprogram the compromised sensors, making them behave as if they are authentic nodes. We consider the problem of distributed detection in wireless sensor networks in the presence of Byzantine attacks where the compromised sensors collaboratively send fictitious observations to the fusion center. We define the power of the attacker as the fraction of the sensors that have been compromised for the attack. We present the optimal attacking strategy for any given attacking power. We show that there is a critical power level above which the fusion center is completely "blinded" in the sense that the optimal detection performs no better than a coin flip independent of collected data. We also present a robust detector to counter the presence of Byzantine attacks