Mobile Replica Node Attack Detection in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

There are many replica detection schemes in the past for the static sensor
networks but due to the unattended nature of wireless sensor networks, an adversary can
capture and compromise sensor nodes, make replicas of them, and then mount a variety of
attacks with these replicas. These replica node attacks are dangerous because they allow
the attacker to leverage the compromise of a few nodes to exert control over much of the
network. Several replica node detection schemes have been proposed in the literature to
defend against such attack s in static sensor networks. However, these schemes rely on
fixed sensor locations and hence do not work in mobile sensor networks, where sensors
are expected to move. In this work, our aim is to propose a fast and effective mobile replica
node detection scheme using Sequential Probability Ratio Test. To the best of our
knowledge, this is the first work to tackle the problem of replica node attacks in mobile
sensor networks. We show analytically and through simulation experiments that our
scheme detects mobile replicas in an efficient and robust manner at the cost of reasonable
overheads.