A Zone-Based Node Replica Detection Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are susceptible to various kinds of attack, and node replication attack is one of them. It is considered to be one of the most serious attacks in WSN. In this type of attack, an adversary deploys clones of a legitimate node. These clones participate in all network activities and behave identically same as the legitimate node. Therefore, detection of clones in the network is a challenging task. Most of the work reported in the literature for clone detection is location dependent. In this paper, we have proposed a location independent zone-based node replica detection technique. In the proposed scheme, the network is dynamically divided into a number of zones. Each zone has a zone-leader, and they share their membership list among themselves. It is the responsibility of the zone-leader to detect the clone. The proposed technique is a deterministic one. We have compared our scheme with LSM, RED, and P-MPC and observed that it has a higher clone detection probability and a lower communication cost.