A Novel Technique to Detect Malicious Packet Dropping Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

The nature of wireless transmission has made wireless sensor networks defenseless against various attacks. Thispaper presents warning message counter method (WMC) to detect blackhole attack, grayhole attack andsinkhole attack in wireless sensor networks. The objective of these attackers are, to draw the nearby networktraffic by false routing information and disrupt the network operation through dropping all the received packets(blackhole attack), selectively dropping the received packets (grayhole and sinkhole attack) and modifying thecontent of the packet (sinkhole attack). We have also attempted light weighted symmetric key cryptography tofind data modification by the sinkhole node. Simulation results shows that, WMC detects sinkhole attack,blackhole attack and grayhole attack with less false positive 8% and less false negative 6%. KCI Citation Count: 1