Biblio

Tactical wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are deployed over a region of interest for mission centric operations. The sink node in a tactical WSN is the aggregation point of data processing. Due to its essential role in the network, the sink node is a high priority target for an attacker who wishes to disable a tactical WSN. This paper focuses on the mitigation of sink-node vulnerability in a tactical WSN. Specifically, we study the issue of protecting the sink node through a technique known as k-anonymity. To achieve k-anonymity, we use a specific routing protocol designed to work within the constraints of WSN communication protocols, specifically IEEE 802.15.4. We use and modify the Lightweight Ad hoc On-Demand Next Generation (LOADng) reactive-routing protocol to achieve anonymity. This modified LOADng protocol prevents an attacker from identifying the sink node without adding significant complexity to the regular sensor nodes. We simulate the modified LOADng protocol using a custom-designed simulator in MATLAB. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our protocol and also show some of the performance tradeoffs that come with this method.

Rapid advances in wireless ad hoc networks lead to increase their applications in real life. Since wireless ad hoc networks have no centralized infrastructure and management, they are vulnerable to several security threats. Malicious packet dropping is a serious attack against these networks. In this attack, an adversary node tries to drop all or partial received packets instead of forwarding them to the next hop through the path. A dangerous type of this attack is called black hole. In this attack, after absorbing network traffic by the malicious node, it drops all received packets to form a denial of service (DOS) attack. In this paper, a dynamic trust model to defend network against this attack is proposed. In this approach, a node trusts all immediate neighbors initially. Getting feedback from neighbors' behaviors, a node updates the corresponding trust value. The simulation results by NS-2 show that the attack is detected successfully with low false positive probability.