An energy-efficient selective forwarding attack detection scheme using lazy detection in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

In the wireless sensor networks, sensor nodes which are deployed in hostile environments can be easily compromised by attackers. The selective forwarding attacks drop a sensitive packet on the path to transmit the data through the compromised node. The existing selective forwarding attack detection scheme randomly selects some intermediate nodes along a forwarding path as checkpoint nodes which are responsible for generating acknowledgements for each received packet. The checkpoint nodes generate and transmit the acknowledgements to detect abnormal packet loss and identify suspect nodes for all packets. Therefore, the existing scheme is not suitable for the wireless sensor networks since the checkpoint nodes cause the excessive cost to detect the suspect nodes for all packets. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient detection scheme for selective forwarding attacks in the wireless sensor networks. The proposed scheme monitors the entire networks based on the transmission time of a path for transmitting each packet. It performs a lazy detection for only the paths that have the potential to have attack nodes. By doing so, the proposed scheme can minimize the cost for detecting selective forwarding attacks. To show the superiority of our scheme, we compare it with the existing selective forwarding attack detection scheme. In the result, our scheme has the similar detection rate as the existing scheme and reduces unnecessary data transmissions by about 35.7 % over the existing scheme. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media.