Sinkhole Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of a large number of nodes, communicating sensor readings to the base stations through other nodes. Due to their energy limitations and positioning in hostile environments, WSNs are vulnerable to various routing attacks. From a security point of view in WSN, data authenticity, confidentiality, Integrity, and availability are the important security goals. It is in common practice that a security protocol used to be created by focusing a particular attack in WSN. Most renowned attacks in WSN are Sybil attack, Denial of Service attack, wormhole attack, selective attack, HELLO Flooding attack, Sinkhole attack etc. This survey focuses on one of the most challenging routing attacks, called Sinkhole attack. A Sinkhole attack is one of the sternest routing attacks because it attracts surrounding nodes with misleading routing path information and performs data forging or selective forwarding of data passing through it. It can cause an energy drain on surrounding nodes resulting in energy holes in WSNs and it can cause inappropriate and potentially dangerous responses based on false measurements. Researchers had presented several ways to detect and identify sinkhole attacks. This survey reviews related work on Sinkhole attack detection, prevention strategies, and attack techniques and also highlights open challenges in dealing with such attacks. Among many discussed techniques, fuzzy logic-based systems are considered to be good in performance in intruder detection system (IDS).