UnMask: Utilizing neighbor monitoring for attack mitigation in multihop wireless sensor networks

  • Authors:

  • Issa Khalil;Saurabh Bagchi;Cristina N. Rotaru;Ness B. Shroff

  • Affiliations:

  • College of Information Technology (CIT), United Arab Emirates University (UAEU), United Arab Emirates;School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Dept. of Computer Science, Purdue University, United States;School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Dept. of Computer Science, Purdue University, United States;ECE and CSE, The Ohio State University, United States

  • Venue:
  • Ad Hoc Networks
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Sensor networks enable a wide range of applications in both military and civilian domains. However, the deployment scenarios, the functionality requirements, and the limited capabilities of these networks expose them to a wide range of attacks against control traffic (such as wormholes, rushing, Sybil attacks, etc.) and data traffic (such as selective forwarding). In this paper we propose a framework called UnMask that mitigates such attacks by detecting, diagnosing, and isolating the malicious nodes. UnMask uses as a fundamental building block the ability of a node to oversee its neighboring nodes' communication. On top of UnMask, we build a secure routing protocol, Lsr, that provides additional protection against malicious nodes by supporting multiple node-disjoint paths. We analyze the security guarantees of UnMask and use ns-2 simulations to show its effectiveness against representative control and data attacks. The overhead analysis we present shows that UnMask is a lightweight protocol appropriate for securing resource constrained sensor networks.