Efficient approach to detect clone attacks in Wireless sensor etworks

Sensor networks allow to deploy large self-organized and adaptable sets of sensors for many applications such as military, environment, health applications etc. Unfortunately, the simplicity and low-cost of the sensors eases cloning of compromised nodes by attackers. This cloning attack is the entry point to a large span of insidious attacks. In such attack, an adversary uses the credentials of a compromised node to surreptitiously introduce replicas of that node into the network. These replicas are then used to launch a variety of attacks that subvert the goal of the sensor application, and the operation of the underlying protocols. The detection of node replication attacks in a wireless sensor network is therefore a fundamental problem. An increasing body of protocols has been proposed in recent years for detecting node replication attack in sensor networks. Most of them however expose the following limitations: high performance overheads, unreasonable assumptions, necessity of central control, lack of smart attack detection etc. To address these issues, we propose two new protocols in this paper: Random Witness Selection (RWS) Protocol & Minimized Random Witness Selection (MRWS) protocol which fulfill the requirements while having only moderation communication and memory overheads. Simulations have also been conducted to evaluate the protocols in terms of security features and performance overheads. Our results show that, compared to previous distributed and centralized approaches RWS and MRWS is more efficient in terms of communication costs in large-scale sensor networks, and at the same time achieves a higher probability of detecting clone attacks.