Single Hop Detection of Node Clone Attacks in Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are often deployed in hostile and unattended environments; they are vulnerable to physical capture and compromise. In a node replication attack or a node clone attack, an adversary physically captures a sensor node, extracts cryptographic secrets from the node, and distributes a large number of replicas of captured node throughout the network, in order to launch a variety of insider attacks. Existing node clone attack detection schemes are mainly focused on stationary sensor networks. Also most existing detection schemes make unrealistic assumptions on the ability of replicas. In this paper, we propose a novel node clone attack detection protocol, namely the Single Hop Detection (SHD) protocol, which is fully distributed, highly robust against node colluding, specifically designed for mobile WSNs. We show analytically under popular mobility models that our protocol provides effective and robust node clone attack detection capability. (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of Harbin University of Science and Technology