RAEED: A formally verified solution to resolve sinkhole attack in Wireless Sensor Network

Denial of Services (DoS) attacks has long been a problem in ad-hoc and wireless networks during data routing. The aim of DoS attacks is to disrupt the routing and prevent data generated from the wireless source nodes to reach the sink or destination nodes. The sinkhole attack is a type of DoS in which the intruder attracts all the data traffic towards itself and does not forward it further. Although numerous solutions have been proposed to avoid sinkhole attack, they all have drawbacks. The main reason is that application of formal methods has not been utilized to confirm whether the solutions are immune from DoS attacks. We have earlier shown how formal modeling can be utilized efficiently to detect the vulnerabilities of existing routing protocols against DoS attacks. We also proposed a new protocol, RAEED (Robust formally Analysed protocol for wirEless sEnsor networks Deployment), which is able to address the problems of most DoS attacks. In this paper we have proved formally that RAEED can avoid Sinkhole attack. Finally computer simulations and practical implementation on McaZ motes have confirmed our results of formal methods.