A Protocol for Intrusion Detection in Location Privacy-Aware Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks come with some very challenging demands for security – they often call for protection against active attackers trying to disrupt a network operation, but also against passive attackers looking for (potentially) sensitive information about the location of a certain node or about the movement of a tracked object. Selective forwarding is a basic yet powerful active attack. It can be detected using several existing techniques if enough information is available to an intrusion detection system. Yet when the system lacks the information due to a location privacy measure, selective forwarding detection becomes complicated. In this paper, we propose a method for detecting selective forwarding attacks and packet modification attacks concurrently with supporting location privacy. The resulting system counters a global eavesdropper capable of some active actions, such as dropping and modification of packets. We also evaluate detection accuracy of the proposed method on a small scale real-world sensor network.