An efficient intruder detection algorithm against sinkhole attacks in wireless sensor networks

In a wireless sensor network, multiple nodes would send sensor readings to a base station for further processing. It is known that such a many-to-one communication is highly vulnerable to a sinkhole attack, where an intruder attracts surrounding nodes with unfaithful routing information, and then performs selective forwarding or alters the data passing through it. A sinkhole attack forms a serious threat to sensor networks, particularly considering that the sensor nodes are often deployed in open areas and of weak computation and battery power. In this paper, we present a novel algorithm for detecting the intruder in a sinkhole attack. The algorithm first finds a list of suspected nodes through checking data consistency, and then effectively identifies the intruder in the list through analyzing the network flow information. The algorithm is also robust to deal with multiple malicious nodes that cooperatively hide the real intruder. We have evaluated the performance of the proposed algorithm through both numerical analysis and simulations, which confirmed the effectiveness and accuracy of the algorithm. Our results also suggest that its communication and computation overheads are reasonably low for wireless sensor networks.