A non cryptographic method of sink hole attack detection in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

A Wireless Sensor network (WSN) consists of large number of low cost low power sensor nodes. The nature of wireless sensor networks makes them very attractive to attackers. One of the most popular and serious attacks in wireless sensor networks is sink hole attack and most existing protocols to defend against this attack used cryptographic methods with keys. In sink hole attack a sensor node will have a lot of false neighbors. Wireless Sensor Network has a dynamic topology, intermittent connectivity, and resource constrained device nodes. Researchers over the past years have encouraged the use of mobile agent to overcome these challenges. The proposed scheme is to defend against sink hole attacks using mobile agents. Mobile agent is a program segment which is self controlling. They navigate from node to node not only transmitting data but also doing computation. They are an effective paradigm for distributed applications, and especially attractive in a dynamic network environment. A routing algorithm with multiple constraints is proposed based on mobile agents. It uses mobile agents to collect information of all mobile sensor nodes to make every node aware of the entire network so that a valid node will not listen the cheating information from malicious or compromised node which leads to sink hole attack. The significant feature of the proposed mechanism is that it does not need any encryption or decryption mechanism to detect the sink hole attack. This mechanism does not require more energy than normal routing protocols like AODV. Here we implement a simulation-based model of our solution to recover from a Sinkhole attack in a Wireless Sensor Network. The mobile agents were developed using the Aglet.