Prevention of Node Clone Attack Secure and Energy Efficient Algorithms in WSN

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are emerging as a commendable choice for monitoring and surveillance application. WSNs are a promising candidate in healthcare, agriculture, and military areas. The reason for the growing popularity of sensor networks is the lightweight sensor nodes. These small sized cost-effective nodes are battery constrained devices with limited computation power and work within short range using wireless communication. These sensor nodes are spatially dispersed in a hostile environment where there is no involvement of human being. The primary motive of these sensor nodes is to sense the physical occurrences in the region-of-interest and perform processing after that transfers the sensed data to the base station. In WSNs, multi-hop communication is preferred for a scalable network. Further, sensor nodes are resource constraints regarding power, computation energy, communication energy, and storage space. The sensor nodes in WSNs are easily approachable by various attackers because sensor nodes are unattended in the hostile environment. An attacker can easily capture sensor nodes, altering information that is being communicated and reduce the capability of the sensor networks to perform its tasks. There are numerous security attacks in the network including clone attacks, Sybil attack, sinkhole attack, traffic analysis attack, wormhole attack, replay attack, black hole attack, and Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. All these attacks have different goals and consequences. Further, these attacks work at different levels during the network lifetime. Out of these security attacks, node clone attack is the most dangerous attacks. In this thesis, we have considered the node clone attack and have proposed the algorithms that secure sensor networks from the node clone attack. In this attack, the attacker compromises the sensor node which is placed in an unattended environment and extracts sensor node secret information like keys and node identification details. newlineSoon after, the attacker starts cloning th