Detecting Sinkhole Attacks in Wireless Sensor Network using Hop Count

Abstract

Presently, the wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are widely used in many areas of communication systems and its security system becomes very important. However, the security mechanism for WSNs has to be considered differently from traditional network. Firstly, there are severe constraints on WSNs devices such as minimal energy, computational and communicational capabilities. Secondly, there is an additional risk of physical attacks such as node capture and tampering. Moreover, cryptography based techniques alone are insufficient to secure WSNs. Hence, intrusion detection techniques must be designed and developed to detect the any kind of undesirable attacks. Further, these techniques should be lightweight because of resource-constrained nature of WSNs. Therefore, we present a new approach of robust and lightweight solution for detecting the Sinkhole attack based on Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) readings of messages. The proposed solution needs collaboration of some Extra Monitor (EM) nodes apart from the ordinary nodes. We use values of RSSI from four EM nodes to determine the position of all sensor nodes where the Base Station (BS) is located at origin position (0,0). We use this information as weight from the BS in order to detect Sinkhole attack. The simulation results show that the proposed mechanism is lightweight due to the monitor nodes were not loaded with any ordinary nodes or BS. Moreover, the proposed mechanism does not cause the communication overhead. © 2009 SICE.