Mobile Intelligence

26.2 ATTACK MODELS IN WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORK

Sensor nodes deployed in a battlefield may have intelligent adversaries operating in their surroundings, intending to subvert, damage, or hijack messages exchanged in the network. The compromise of a sensor node can lead to greater damage to the network. All security solutions proposed for sensor networks need to operate with minimal energy usage, without affecting the security of the network. We classify sensor network attacks into three main categories:

• identity attacks,
• physical-layer attacks,
• denial of service, and
• distributed denial of service.

26.2.1 Identity Attacks

Identity attacks intend to steal the identities of legitimate nodes operating in the sensor network. The purpose of these attacks is to facilitate rogue node participation to either deny the base station access to sensor readings or to tamper with node readings.

26.2.1.1 Sybil Attack

A Sybil attack is defined as an identity attack wherein malicious devices illegitimately take on multiple identities in the network [15]. The malicious device's additional identities resulting from such an attack are termed as Sybil nodes. Messages received by a Sybil node are in actuality received by the malicious device and all messages transmitted by the Sybil nodes are actually sent by the malicious device. Another version of such an attack is when the Sybil nodes are inaccessible for direct communication by legitimate operating nodes of the network. In such scenarios, the malicious ...