Detection of Selective Forwarding (Gray Hole) Attack on LEACH in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are mainly deployed in an unattended and hostile environment. So security is a major concern in these types of networks. Many routing protocols have been designed in WSN, which are responsible for maintaining the routes in the network. We mainly focused on LEACH, the most popular hierarchical routing protocol. But the services of LEACH are threatened by various kinds of attacks such as Black Hole, Selective Forwarding (Gray Hole), Sybil, and HELLO flood attacks. In this paper, firstly we have discussed LEACH and then how it can be compromised by Selective Forwarding Attack. The performance of LEACH without the existence of attack and with the attack has been evaluated in terms of various performance metrics such as packet delivery ratio, packet loss, and remaining energy of the network using Network Simulator (NS-2). We have also emphasized on how to secure the network if they have been threatened to Selective Forwarding Attack. To detect the malicious nodes in the network, we have proposed and implemented a detection strategy.