Detection and Prevention of Selective Forwarding-Based Denial-of-Service Attacks in WSNs

Abstract

Designing wireless sensor networks (WSNs) that can work reliably in the presence of inside packet drop attackers is very challenging. Current trust mechanisms and avoidance approaches are promising but have their limitations. Avoidance approaches transmit multiple copies of the packets to avoid attackers and cause high overhead. In trust mechanisms, each sensor monitors it neighbors, evaluates their trustworthiness, classifies them as either trustworthy or untrustworthy, and then discards untrustworthy sensors from the network. However, malicious insiders, which are legitimate members of the network and know exactly what their monitoring nodes know, can launch attacks carefully to avoid being detected and discarded from the network. In this paper, we first show that this is possible by introducing a selective forwarding-based denial-of-service (DoS) attack. We then propose an enhanced trust mechanism to detect such attackers and identify their victims. Furthermore, we design two attacker-aware protocols to reroute victim nodes' packets by avoiding the attackers. We conduct extensive OPNET simulations to validate our claims and demonstrate the advantages of our proposed approaches. Finally, as a complementary defensive method to our detection and avoidance approaches, we introduce a prevention routing algorithm that proactively prevents the attack and provide our preliminary results to evaluate its performance.

Current State of Art in Security of Data Aggregator in Smart Grids

“…The defensive mechanism to the selective forwarding attack is the [21] beta and entropy trust mechanism. This protocol is based on two steps: detection of attacker and the re-routing awareness of the attacker.…”

Ant based Defense Mechanism for Selective Forwarding Attack in MANET

“…Youngho Cho and Gang Qu [4] proposed an enhanced trust mechanism for detecting such attackers and identify their victims. Then two attacker-aware protocols were designed to reroute victim nodes' packets by avoiding the attackers.…”

“…Second is to prevent data collected by certain sensor nodes from reaching the destination. In the second case, the victim node could not reach destination and this attack is selective forwarding-based denial-of-service (DoS) attack [4]. Selective forwarding attack enables malicious nodes to try to stop the packets in the network by refusing to forward or drop the messages passing through them.…”

“…By delaying packets: they delay packets passing through them, creating the confused routing information between nodes [5]. Selective forwarding is the most difficult attack to find defense mechanism [4].…”

Detection of Insider Selective Forwarding Attack Based on Monitor Node and Trust Mechanism in WSN

“…Selective forwarding attack [4] is such a form of attack which is hardest to resist among various kinds of insider attacks. The malicious node drops all the forwarded packets to launch a black hole attack.…”