Using Time-Location Tags and Watchdog Nodes to Defend Against Node Replication Attack in Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks

Node replication attack is one of the well-known and dangerous attacks against Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in which adversary enters the network, searches randomly and captures one or multiple normal nodes. Adversary extracts data and keying materials of the captured node and generates several copies of that node and deploys them in the network. In this paper, a novel algorithm using watchdog nodes is proposed to detect replica nodes in mobile WSNs. The main idea of the proposed algorithm is inspired by maximum predefined speed for sensor nodes and using time-location tags by the watchdog nodes to detect replica nodes. Watchdog nodes collaborate to measure sensor nodes’ speed in the environment and if they find that a node moves faster than a predefined threshold, they mark it as a malicious node, because such replica node in different regions of the network is moving faster than usual in different regions of the network. The proposed algorithm is implemented by J-SIM simulator and its performance is evaluated in terms of false detection and true detection rates through some experiments. Experiment results show that the proposed algorithm is able to detect 100% of replica nodes, while the false detection rate is less than 0.5%.