Physical cyber-security algorithm for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Today, the wireless sensor network (WSN) plays an important role in our daily life. In addition, it is used in many applications such as military, medical, greenhouse, and transport. Due to the sending data between its nodes or to the base station requires a connection link, the sensor nodes can be exposed to the many attacks that exploit the weaknesses of the network. One of the most important types of these attacks is the denial of service (DoS). DoS attack exhausts the system's resources that lead the system to be out of service. In this paper, a cyber-security algorithm is proposed for physical level of WSN that adopts message queuing telemetry transport (MQTT) protocol for data transmission and networking. This algorithm predicts the DoS attacks at the first time of happening to be isolated from the WSN. It includes three stages of detecting the attack, predicting the effects of this attack and preventing the attacks by excluding the predicted nodes from the WSN. We applied a type of DoS attack that is a DoS injection attack (DoSIA) on the network protocol. The proposed algorithm is tested by adopting three case studies to cover the most common cases of attacks. The experiment results show the superior of the proposed algorithm in detecting and solving the cyber-attacks.