Wireless Sensor Replica Detection in Mobile Environments

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) pose a few unique security challenges due to the fact that they (often) run unattended, do not rely on tamper-resistant hardware, and are severely resource constrainedto name a few. In this context, a particularly dreadful attack is the replica attack. That is, sensors are captured and their state seized, and replicated in reprogrammed sensors that can also perform some rogue activities. While some solutions to this problem do exist in static WSNs, mobile WSNs lack of solutions that are both eective and ecient, due to the complexity added by sensor mobility. In this paper, we propose a novel solution against the replica attack in mobile WSNs. In particular, we provide the following contributions: we rst introduce a novel real- istic attacker model that can be used to assess the quality of the solutions provided. Later, we detail a distributed, ecient, and cooperative protocol to detect replica. Leveraging just local (one-hop) communications and node mobility our solution en- forces the property of replica detection. Finally, our solution is checked against the introduced attacker model. Both analysis and simulation results show that our solu- tion is eective and ecientproviding high detection rate while incurring limited overhead.