Analysis of Byzantine Attacks for Target Tracking in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Herein, the problem of target tracking in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is investigated in the presence of Byzantine attacks. More specifically, we analyze the impact of Byzantine attacks on the performance of a tracking system. First, under the condition of jointly estimating the target state and the attack parameters, the posterior Cramer–Rao lower bound (PCRLB) is calculated. Then, from the perspective of attackers, we define the optimal Byzantine attack and theoretically find a way to achieve such an attack with minimal cost. When the attacked nodes are correctly identified by the fusion center (FC), we further define the suboptimal Byzantine attack and also find a way to realize such an attack. Finally, in order to alleviate the negative impact of attackers on the system performance, a modified sampling importance resampling (SIR) filter is proposed. Simulation results show that the tracking results of the modified SIR filter can be close to the true trajectory of the moving target. In addition, when the quantization level increases, both the security performance and the estimation performance of the tracking system are improved.

Wireless sensor network security: A recent review based on state-of-the-art works

“…All of these actions impair network performance, interfere with network routing services, and consume network component resources. 125 Once attackers have yielded the active group of insider nodes in the network hostile, the entire network will be under their control, and further safe data transfer will be impossible. 126 present a viable approach for identifying information insertion and Byzantine attacks utilising the proposed unpredictable network coding scheme.…”

International Journal of Electronics and Telecommunications

“…The Byzantine attack involves one or more compromised nodes working in a complicit way to carry-on different type of attacks such as forwarding packets through non-optimal routes, creating routing loops, or selectively drops packets thus degrading the performance of the network, disruption the network routing services, and draining the resources of the network component. The Byzantine attack is not easy to detect because the network does not demonstrate detectable abnormal activities [74] [59] [13] [55].…”