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 constrained-to 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 eventually performing some rogue activities. While some solutions to this problem do exist in static WSNs, mobile WSNs lack of solutions that are both effective and efficient, 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 first introduce a novel realistic attacker model that can be used to assess the quality of the solutions provided. Later, we detail a distributed, efficient, and cooperative protocol to detect replica. Leveraging just local (one-hop) communications and node mobility our solution enforces the emergent property of replica detection. Finally, our solution is tested against the introduced attacker model. Simulation results show that our solution is effective and efficient-providing high detection rate while incurring limited overhead. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.