Emergent properties: detection of the node-capture attack in mobile wireless sensor networks

One of the most vexing problems in wireless sensor network security is the node capture attack. An adversary can capture a node from the network as the first step for further different types of attacks. For example, the adversary can collect all the cryptographic material stored in the node. Also, the node can be reprogrammed and re-deployed in the network in order to perform malicious activities. To the best of our knowledge no distributed solution has been proposed to detect a node capture in a mobile wireless sensor network. In this paper we propose an efficient and distributed solution to this problem leveraging emergent properties of mobile wireless sensor networks. In particular, we introduce two solutions: SDD, that does not require explicit information exchange between the nodes during the local detection, and CCD, a more sophisticated protocol that uses local node cooperation in addition to mobility to greatly improve performance. We also introduce a benchmark to compare these solutions with. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of our proposal. For instance, while the benchmark requires about 9,000 seconds to detect node captures, CDD requires less than 2,000 seconds. These results support our intuition that node mobility, in conjunction with a limited amount of local cooperation, can be used to detect emergent global properties.