Active Cross-Layer Location Identification of attackers in wireless sensor networks

While current research of secure localization in wireless sensor networks focuses on devising localization schemes robust to malicious attacks, there is little effort on locating and finally eliminating the malicious source. This paper addresses this open problem of locating a static malicious source that intentionally hides or falsifies its position equipped with directional antenna in sensor networks. A novel localization mechanism, called ACLI, is proposed in this paper, which combines sensor coordination with the traditional range-free localization method to successfully locate such an adversary. The main idea here is to use coordination of multiple sensors to locate the adversary and optimize the process with a finite horizon discrete Markov decision process (MDP). The estimation error ratio (error/radius) of an attacker´s location is less than 30% in ACLI, as which is shown in our simulation result.