Security computing for the resiliency of protecting from internal attacks in distributed wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor network (WSNs) have been making up of a mass of spatially distributed autonomous sensors to monitor physical or environmental conditions. However, security threats to WSNs become increasingly diversified, prevention based due to their open nature. An adversary can easily eavesdrop and replay or inject fabricated messages. Different cryptographic methods can be used to defend against some of such attacks but very limited. For example, node compromise, another major problem of WSNs security, raised a serious challenge for WSNs as it allows an adversary to enter inside the security perimeter of the network. This paper is focusing on investigating internal attacks of distributed wireless sensor networks with multi-hop and single sinker, where we show our novel algorithm, with our new concept of controllable resiliency of WSNs, to ensure the targeted WSN always running at the designed resiliency level. The final experimental and simulation results showed that that the proposed algorithm does work well at the designed level. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.