ASSESSING SECURITY RISK FOR WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS UNDER CYBER ATTACK

A common deployment strategy for wireless sensor networks is to position sensors according to a probabilistic distribution. Some sensor distributions offer advantages in redundancy, which helps ensure network survivability even with the loss of multiple sensor nodes to cyber attack. Properly selecting an initial sensor deployment distribution mitigates the threat of a denial of service (DoS) attack. While it is clear that some distributions are superior to others, it is not clear how to select the best sensor distribution as a defensive measure. Current strategies rely on mathematical analysis and are restricted to a subset of possible distributions. This paper examines the problem from an experimental perspective. We propose a novel method for evaluating how a given sensor deployment pattern may withstand a DoS attack based on agent-based simulation. We have implemented a first prototype of our model and illustrate its feasibility as part of a future decision support system.