An application-driven perspective on wireless devises security: the case of distributed denial-of-service (ddos)

Denial of service attacks, viruses and worms are common tools for malicious adversarial behavior in networks. With the increasing ubiquity of personal computing handheld devices, such as mobile phones and PDAs, together with deployment of sensor networks, experience shows that over the last few years attacker who are specializing in disrupting and hijacking these wireless peripheral devices are gaining widespread access to potentially lucrative corporate and government information. Several of these tools have probably been used increasingly as part of hostile behavior either independently, or in conjunction with other forms of attack in conventional or asymmetric warfare, as well as in other forms of malicious behavior. In this paper we concentrate on Distributed Denial of Service Attacks (DDoS) detections by applying sensor nodes where one or more attackers generate flooding traffics and direct it from multiple sources towards a selected node. The dynamic and wide range of connectivity in between states (Busy, Idle, Suspend and Off) provides means of determining thresholds of normal resource usability and activities in each state within sensor nodes. We then present a technique that can be used for DDoS detection based on resource usability of sensor nodes. We measure resource dissipation in different nodes, make comparison and evaluate their resource usability. We use Hawk sensor nodes to do experiment on our test-bed to show the positive outcomes that DDoS attack on sensor nodes can be detected from the resource usability.