Sinkhole Vulnerabilities in Wireless Sensor Networks

2013

Generally wireless sensor networks rely of manyto-one communication approach for data gathering. This approach is extremely susceptible to sinkhole attack, where an intruder attracts surrounding nodes with unfaithful routing information, and subsequently presents selective forwarding or change the data that carry through it. A sinkhole attack causes an important threat to sensor networks and it should be considered that the sensor nodes are mostly spread out in open areas and of weak computation and battery power. In order to detect the intruder in a sinkhole attack this paper suggests an algorithm which firstly finds a group of suspected nodes by analyzing the consistency of data. Then, the intruder is recognized efficiently in the group by checking the network flow information. The proposed algorithm's performance has been evaluated by using numerical analysis and simulations. Therefore, accuracy and efficiency of algorithm would be verified.

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is emerging as a prevailing technology due to its wide range of applications in military and civilian domains. These networks are easily prone to security attacks. Unattended installation of sensor nodes in the environment causes many security threats in the wireless sensor networks. There are many possible attacks on sensor network such as selective forwarding, jamming, sinkhole, wormhole, Sybil and hello flood attacks. Sinkhole attack is among the most destructive routing attacks for these networks. It may cause the intruder to lure all or most of the data flow that has to be captured at the base station. Once sinkhole attack has been implemented and the adversary node has started to work as network member in the data routing, it can apply some more threats such as black hole or grey hole. Ultimately this drop of some important data packets can disrupt the sensor networks completely. This paper focuses on the various methods that can be implemented to overcome this attack likeLocation Based Compromise Tolerant Security Mechanism, Hop Count Monitoring Scheme and through Non Cryptographic Method of Sinkhole Attack Detection.

Algorithmic Aspects of …, 2008

WSN is one of the modern networks that use technologies and applications in public places. It consists of hundreds and thousands of tiny sensor nodes scattered in the network and has limited scope and range resources connected to the base stations. The specifications of these nodes are low cost and low energy and used for monitoring purposes. Since the sensors are small and many, it is easy to attack these networks. Therefore, there will be many potential attacks on the network of sensors, and among these attacks are jamming, sinkhole, eavesdropping, and other attacks. The sinkhole attack is the most attack that works to destroy paths by announcing the update of the fake routing related to it; the attack occurs through the compromised node (the malicious node) So that it announces a file containing the routing information and works to attract the rest of the nodes to do this routing the data towards it and then operating the sphere of influence. One of the effects of this attack is to reduce the overall network performance, and it can also be used to make another attack, such as a selective redirection attack and a spoofing attack. This paper aims to analyze and detect sinkhole attacks in wireless sensor networks.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are used in many applications in military, ecological, and health-related areas. These applications often include the monitoring of sensitive information such as enemy movement on the battlefield or the location of personnel in a building. Security is therefore important in WSNs. However, WSNs suffer from many constraints, including low computation capability, small memory, limited energy resources, susceptibility to physical capture, and the use of insecure wireless communication channels. These constraints make security in WSNs a challenge. In this article we discuss security issues in WSNs. In a wireless sensor network, multiple nodes would send sensor readings to a base station for further processing. It is well-known that such a many-to-one communication is highly vulnerable to the sinkhole attack, where an intruder attracts surrounding nodes with unfaithful routing information, and then performs selective forwarding or alters the data passing through it. A sinkhole attack forms a serious threat to sensor networks, particularly considering that such networks are often deployed in open areas and of weak computation and battery power. In this paper, we discuss SINKHOLE ATTACK as a major problem in wireless sensor networks. Later on an efficient algorithm will be designed to prevent the network from these type of attacks.

Indian Journal of Science and Technology, 2017

Objectives: Wireless sensor networks are used, especially in military, tracking and monitoring applications. Security systems play an important role as the wireless nature is susceptible to attacks. The main idea is to analyse the performance of the network when subjected to sinkhole attack for various scenarios. Methods/Statistical Analysis: Limited energy, computational capacity and storage are some of the constraints on sensor networks which make it to analyze in a different way compared to adhoc networks. In this paper, we discuss the various attacks and attributes which are used to detect the attacks and present a simulation on the effect of sinkhole attack based on various set of parameters. The performance of the system is analyzed when the network is being subjected to sinkhole attack considering the scenarios of varying network size, number of compromised node, intruder power and the location of the sinkhole attack. The available detection methods of the sinkhole attack are tabulated. Findings: Parameters such as average energy consumption, throughput and packet delivery ratio are analyzed. It is seen that the network performance is degraded by the implementation of the attack and there is a decrease in parameters analyzed when subjected to various scenarios. Application/ Improvement: The variation of the parameters in the attack scenarios will be useful in formulating a detection algorithm. The network can be analysed for different scenarios and more number of parameters.

2014

A wireless sensor network consists of a set of geographically distributed sensor nodes, which continuously monitor their surroundings and forward the sensing data to a base station through multi-hop routing. These networks use radio communications as a media for transmission which make them susceptible to different types of attacks. Sinkhole attack is considered as one of the severe attacks that is launched by a compromised node to divert the network traffic away from the intended route, Through this procedure sinkhole node attempts to draw all network traffic to itself. Thereafter it alters the data packets or drops the packets silently and finally destroy the network. A sinkhole attack causes a serious threat to sensor networks. In order to detect the sinkhole attack it is required to do enhancement in AODV based routing algorithm, which uses mobile agents designed for wireless sensor networks. In this proposal Mobile agents are used to collect information of all sensor nodes to make every node aware of the entire network, so that a valid node will not listen the cheating information from malicious node and detect sinkhole node based on finding difference of nodes sequence numbers using threshold value.

Computer Communications, 2007

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— Nowadays wireless sensor network has gained a lot of importance in many areas, especially in military operations and monitoring applications. The size of the sensor nodes might range from that of a shoebox down to the size of a grain dust. These sensor nodes are vulnerable to various types of attacks, sensor nodes mainly sense the data and send it to the base station, during this transmission the major attack faced by the wireless sensor network is sinkhole attack, and presence of sinkhole node lure's all the network traffic away from the base station towards itself. Thereafter it can either alter the data packets or drop the packets without giving the base station a hint and finally destroy the network. Over the past years researchers have encouraged the use of mobile agents as a new and smart paradigm for distributed applications to overcome the limitations of sensor nodes. In order to detect the sinkhole attack it is required to do enhancement in routing algorithm, which uses mobile agents designed for wireless sensor networks.

International journal of engineering research and technology, 2018

Wireless Sensor Network is a collection of the large number of small sensor node that has the capabilities to sense, collect, and disseminate information in many types of applications. This paper on exploring several types of security attack in wireless sensor network and counteragent against sinkhole attack. The Introduction sections give brief information about WSN, its components, and architecture. In next section discuss Sinkhole attack & its counteragent method and Then In Suggested Methodology Section author suggest a new technique to detect the sinkhole attack in a wireless sensor network (WSNs) which is based on the analysis of routing behaviour.

International Conference on Wireless Networks, 2009

A sinkhole attack is one of the severe attacks in wireless sensor networks. This attack compromises nodes of a particular are, and diverts the traffic from the base station into the sinkhole. To determine a sinkhole, we first derive the quality of the link using forward and reverse transmission metrics and a stochastic model. We then use the sampling technique to confirm the quality of the link. The two methods along with root mean square formula detect the area concentrated by the malicious nodes. The proposed model for quality of link leads to determine the compromised nodes in the path and the sinkhole.

2014 2nd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Modelling and Simulation, 2014

Security of deployed wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has become a crucial task as the deployment of WSN'S grows. This paper proposes a novel way and develops a mechanism to prevent wormhole attacks by an algorithm to manage a large number of nodes using node ID. Also, the proposal creates a load balancing feature for monitoring a hierarchical system for nodes and extra packet header on each node to make sure it is not compromised. Even though an attack is inevitable on a live node network using a simulator, this paper has shown how the network nodes can be rerouted to avoid the attacked nodes.

International Journal on AdHoc Networking Systems, 2012

Sensor nodes, when deployed to form Wireless sensor network operating under control of central authority i.e. Base station are capable of exhibiting interesting applications due to their ability to be deployed ubiquitously in hostile & pervasive environments. But due to same reason security is becoming a major concern for these networks. Wireless sensor networks are vulnerable against various types of external and internal attacks being limited by computation resources, smaller memory capacity, limited battery life, processing power & lack of tamper resistant packaging. This survey paper is an attempt to analyze threats to Wireless sensor networks and to report various research efforts in studying variety of routing attacks which target the network layer. Particularly devastating attack is Wormhole attack-a Denial of Service attack, where attackers create a low-latency link between two points in the network. With focus on survey of existing methods of detecting Wormhole attacks, researchers are in process to identify and demarcate the key research challenges for detection of Wormhole attacks in network layer.

2012

The nature of wireless ad hoc and sensor networks make them very attractive to attackers. One of the most popular and serious attack in wireless ad hoc and sensor network is the wormhole attack. It is a particularly severe attack on routing protocols for ad hoc networks in which two or more colluding attackers record packets at one location, and tunnel them to another location for a replay at that remote location. When this attack targets routing control packets, the nodes that are close to the attackers are defended from any alternative routes with more than one or two hops to the remote location. All routes are thus directed to the wormhole established by the attackers. This paper focuses on Wormhole attack detection in wireless sensor network. The wormhole attack is particularly challenging to deal with since the adversary does not need to compromise any nodes and can use laptops or other wireless devices to send the packets on a low latency channel. In This paper we have discuss...

ipcsit.com

Unattended installation of sensor nodes (Motes) in the environment causes many security threats in the wireless sensor networks. Sinkhole attack is among the most destructive routing attacks for these networks. It may cause the intruder to lure all or most ...