Solutions to Node Replication Attacks in Wireless

Sensor Networks: A Road Map

P. Raghu Vamsi and Krishna Kant
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, Noida, India.
prvonline@yahoo.co.in, k.kant@yahoo.co.in
AbstractLimitations of sensor nodes such as lack of tamper
proof bodies, deployment in hostile and remote environments,
resource constraint nature, etc., made Wireless Sensor Networks
(WSNs) prone to a diversity of security attacks. Among the
potential attacks, Sybil attack is a severe security threat in which
a malicious node attempts to misrepresent its identity, position
data and secret key material to disrupt or gain control over the
network activities. To mitigate this attack, numerous researchers
have proposed a wide variety of solutions. In this paper, the
authors provide a discussion on the state-of-the-art solutions
to Sybil attacks. The goal of this paper is to study the latest
developments and to provide a road map for further research.
KeywordsSybil attack, Security attacks, Sensor nodes, Wireless
sensor networks.
I. INTRODUCTION
A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) consists of tiny and
low-cost Sensor Nodes (SNs) that are often deployed in a
remote and hostile environments to monitor or sense an object
or process of interest []. Basically, SNs are built without tamper
proof bodies to reduce commercial cost. In addition, they are
resource constrained and uses broadcast as communication
pattern. Due to such peculiar characteristics, it is an easy
undertaking to an adversary to change over a legitimate node
into a malicious node by capturing and loading malicious code
into nodes chip. It is represented in [] that an adversary can
capture and tamper a SN using some advanced tools within
one minute. These tampered nodes exhibit deviated behavior
from regular network operations which can lead to security
attacks. Among the possible potential attacks, Sybil attacks is
a severe threat in which a compromised node misrepresent
node identity, location information, secrete key material to
disrupt or gain control over the network activities. In addition,
such tampered nodes can launch security threats like sink
hole attack, black hole attack, on-off attack, selsh behavior
attack, Grey hole attack, packet modication attacks and can
launch Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack by jamming the signals.
Furthermore, a compromised node can create a wormhole
by combining with another powerful compromised node in
a network []. However, node capture and tamper is the entry
point to all such security attacks. Due to the inclemency of the
problem, identifying and proposing solutions to detect Sybil
attacks become an imperative research paradigm in the WSNs
security.