An asynchronous node replication attack in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Applications of wireless sensor network (WSN) are growing significantly, and many security protocols meant for WSN have been proposed. One of the unique problems of WSN is that the sensor nodes are not tamper resistant as the main attraction of deploying WSN is its low cost. Node replication attack exploits this weakness to launch an attack, in which cryptographic secrets from the compromised sensor nodes are used to create duplicate sensor nodes in large number. Then these sensor nodes are placed in critical locations of the WSN to mount attacks. Several protocols were proposed to defend WSN against the replication attack, and one of the promising among them is distributed detection protocol presented by Parno et al. at IEEE S&P 2005. However, we show in this paper that their distributed detection protocol is vulnerable to an asynchronous node replication attack. Further, we modify the protocol to make it secure for dynamic WSN supporting node mobility. © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.