How to Detect and Mitigate Sinkhole Attack in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN)

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is an emerging technology due to its wide range of applications in public and military area. These sensor networks consist of thousands of diminutive sensor nodes with limited resources with a base station of low cost and low power sensor nodes that are used for the monitoring purpose. Due to their energy limitations and positioning in hostile environments, WSNs are vulnerable to various routing attacks. Data authenticity, confidentiality, Integrity, and availability are the important security goals of WSNs. Most renowned attacks in WSN are Sybil attack, Denial of Service attack, wormhole attack, selective attack, HELLO Flooding attack, Sinkhole attack etc. Sinkhole attack is one of the most serious routing attacks because it attracts surrounding nodes with misleading routing path information and performs selective forwarding of data. Sinkhole attack is the kind of attack which degrades the performance of the network. It can cause an energy drain on surrounding nodes because it cause inappropriate and potentially dangerous responses based on false measurement.