Detecting and preventing beacon replay attacks in receiver-initiated MAC protocols for energy efficient WSNs

Abstract

In receiver-initiated MAC protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), communication is initiated by the receiver of the data through beacons containing the receiver's identity. In this paper, we consider the case of a network intruder that captures and replays such beacons towards legitimate nodes, pretending to have a fake identity within the network. To prevent this attack we propose RAP, a challenge-response authentication protocol that is able to detect and prevent the beacon replay attack. The effectiveness of the protocol is formally verified using OFMC and ProVerif. Furthermore, we provide an analysis that highlights the trade-offs between the energy consumption and the level of security, defined as the resilience of the protocol to space exhaustion. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.