Routing Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey
---
paper_title: Security in Wireless Sensor Networks: Issues and Challenges

paper_content:

Wireless sensor network (WSN) is an emerging technology that shows great promise for various futuristic applications both for mass public and military. The sensing technology combined with processing power and wireless communication makes it lucrative for being exploited in abundance in future. The inclusion of wireless communication technology also incurs various types of security threats. The intent of this paper is to investigate the security related issues and challenges in wireless sensor networks. We identify the security threats, review proposed security mechanisms for wireless sensor networks. We also discuss the holistic view of security for ensuring layered and robust security in wireless sensor networks.
---
paper_title: Wireless sensor networks: a survey

paper_content:

This paper describes the concept of sensor networks which has been made viable by the convergence of micro-electro-mechanical systems technology, wireless communications and digital electronics. First, the sensing tasks and the potential sensor networks applications are explored, and a review of factors influencing the design of sensor networks is provided. Then, the communication architecture for sensor networks is outlined, and the algorithms and protocols developed for each layer in the literature are explored. Open research issues for the realization of sensor networks are also discussed.
---
paper_title: A Survey of Attacks, Security Mechanisms and Challenges in Wireless Sensor Networks

paper_content:

Wireless Sensor networks (WSN) is an emerging technology and have great potential to be employed in critical situations like battlefields and commercial applications such as building, traffic surveillance, habitat monitoring and smart homes and many more scenarios. One of the major challenges wireless sensor networks face today is security. While the deployment of sensor nodes in an unattended environment makes the networks vulnerable to a variety of potential attacks, the inherent power and memory limitations of sensor nodes makes conventional security solutions unfeasible. The sensing technology combined with processing power and wireless communication makes it profitable for being exploited in great quantity in future. The wireless communication technology also acquires various types of security threats. This paper discusses a wide variety of attacks in WSN and their classification mechanisms and different securities available to handle them including the challenges faced.
---
paper_title: Security in Wireless Sensor Networks

paper_content:

Wireless sensor networks, a new generation of real-time embedded systems with limited computational power and memory that has a variety of applications, especially in cases that are not possible using traditional networks. With advances in technology, the ability of the sensor network advances as well. Given that the existing environment is unsecured, wireless connections and nodes have limited abilities and there are internal and external threats and opportunities, an attacker can use a computer system with a high ability to penetrate the network. Therefore, security in wireless sensor networks is a critical challenge. In this paper, the issue of security in wireless sensor networks is discussed.
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paper_title: Random key predistribution schemes for sensor networks

paper_content:

Key establishment in sensor networks is a challenging problem because asymmetric key cryptosystems are unsuitable for use in resource constrained sensor nodes, and also because the nodes could be physically compromised by an adversary. We present three new mechanisms for key establishment using the framework of pre-distributing a random set of keys to each node. First, in the q-composite keys scheme, we trade off the unlikeliness of a large-scale network attack in order to significantly strengthen random key predistribution's strength against smaller-scale attacks. Second, in the multipath-reinforcement scheme, we show how to strengthen the security between any two nodes by leveraging the security of other links. Finally, we present the random-pairwise keys scheme, which perfectly preserves the secrecy of the rest of the network when any node is captured, and also enables node-to-node authentication and quorum-based revocation.
---
paper_title: Black hole attack in mobile Ad Hoc networks

paper_content:

The black hole problem is one of the security attacks that occur in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). We present two possible solutions. The first is to find more than one route to the destination. The second is to exploit the packet sequence number included in any packet header. Computer simulation shows that compared to the original ad hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV) routing scheme, the second solution can verify 75% to 98% of the route to the destination depending on the pause times at a minimum cost of the delay in the networks.
---
paper_title: Denial of Service Attacks in Wireless Ad hoc Networks

paper_content:

During the past decade, the speed and reliability of communication over wireless network has been increased drastically . One area of great interest in distributed system is wireless ad-hoc network (WANETs) that allows collaboration in real time. Wireless ad hoc networks are formed by a set of hosts that communicate with each other over a wireless channel. Denials of Service attacks are real threat to wireless systems such as WANETs. This paper provides a survey of these attacks in WANETs.
---
paper_title: Analysis of wormhole intrusion attacks in MANETS

paper_content:

Wormhole refers to an attack on MANET routing protocols in which colluding nodes create an illusion that two remote regions of a MANET are directly connected through nodes that appear to be neighbors but are actually distant from one another. Our focus in this paper is a particular form of the wormhole attack called the self-contained in-band wormhole. In this paper we analyze the criterion for successful wormhole attack on a MANET. Based on results collected from a Qualnet simulation, we evaluate the likelihood of such an attack. We further classify the wormhole scenarios into successful, unsuccessful, doubtful, interesting, and uninteresting. We also define wormhole strength and observe that the detection ratio of the technique proposed in varies with wormhole strength as well as with the network topology. The simulation statistics also show that the wormholes having higher strength have a higher detection ratio as compared to the ones with lower strength.
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paper_title: Packet leashes: a defense against wormhole attacks in wireless networks

paper_content:

As mobile ad hoc network applications are deployed, security emerges as a central requirement. In this paper, we introduce the wormhole attack, a severe attack in ad hoc networks that is particularly challenging to defend against. The wormhole attack is possible even if the attacker has not compromised any hosts, and even if all communication provides authenticity and confidentiality. In the wormhole attack, an attacker records packets (or bits) at one location in the network, tunnels them (possibly selectively) to another location, and retransmits them there into the network. The wormhole attack can form a serious threat in wireless networks, especially against many ad hoc network routing protocols and location-based wireless security systems. For example, most existing ad hoc network routing protocols, without some mechanism to defend against the wormhole attack, would be unable to find routes longer than one or two hops, severely disrupting communication. We present a new, general mechanism, called packet leashes, for detecting and thus defending against wormhole attacks, and we present a specific protocol, called TIK, that implements leashes.
---
paper_title: Hello Flood Attack and its Countermeasures in Wireless Sensor Networks

paper_content:

Wireless sensor network have emerged as an important application of the ad-hoc networks paradigm, such as for monitoring physical environment. These sensor networks have limitations of system resources like battery power, communication range and processing capability. Low processing power and wireless connectivity make such networks vulnerable to various types of network attacks. One of them is hello flood attack, in which an adversary, which is not a legal node in the network, can flood hello request to any legitimate node and break the security of WSN. The current solutions for these types of attacks are mainly cryptographic, which suffer from heavy computational complexity. Hence they are less suitable for wireless sensor networks. In this paper a method based on signal strength has been proposed to detect and prevent hello flood attack. Nodes have been classified as friend and stranger based on the signal strength. Short client puzzles that require less computational power and battery power have been used to check the validity of suspicious nodes.
---
paper_title: SybilGuard: defending against sybil attacks via social networks

paper_content:

Peer-to-peer and other decentralized, distributed systems are known to be particularly vulnerable to sybil attacks. In a sybil attack, a malicious user obtains multiple fake identities and pretends to be multiple, distinct nodes in the system. By controlling a large fraction of the nodes in the system, the malicious user is able to ldquoout voterdquo the honest users in collaborative tasks such as Byzantine failure defenses. This paper presents SybilGuard, a novel protocol for limiting the corruptive influences of sybil attacks. Our protocol is based on the ldquosocial networkrdquo among user identities, where an edge between two identities indicates a human-established trust relationship. Malicious users can create many identities but few trust relationships. Thus, there is a disproportionately small ldquocutrdquo in the graph between the sybil nodes and the honest nodes. SybilGuard exploits this property to bound the number of identities a malicious user can create. We show the effectiveness of SybilGuard both analytically and experimentally.
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paper_title: Distributed, secure load balancing with skew, heterogeneity and churn

paper_content:

Numerous proposals exist for load balancing in peer-to-peer (p2p) networks. Some focus on namespace balancing, making the distance between nodes as uniform as possible. This technique works well under ideal conditions, but not under those found empirically. Instead, researchers have found heavy-tailed query distributions (skew), high rates of node join and leave (churn) and wide variation in node network and storage capacity (heterogeneity). Other approaches tackle these less-than-ideal conditions, but give up on important security properties. We propose an algorithm that both facilitates good performance and does not dilute security. Our algorithm, k-choices, achieves load balance by greedily matching nodes' target workloads with actual applied workloads through limited sampling and limits any fundamental decrease in security by basing each nodes' set of potential identifiers on a single certificate. Our algorithm compares favorably to four others in trace-driven simulations. We have implemented our algorithm and found that it improved aggregate throughput by 20% in a widely heterogeneous system in our experiments.
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paper_title: An Adaptive Approach to Detecting Black and Gray Hole Attacks in Ad Hoc Network

paper_content:

Black and gray hole attack is one kind of routing disturbing attacks and can bring great damage to the network. As a result, an efficient algorithm to detect black and gray attack is important. This paper demonstrates an adaptive approach to detecting black and gray hole attacks in ad hoc network based on a cross layer design. In network layer, we proposed a path-based method to overhear the next hop’s action. This scheme does not send out extra control packets and saves the system resources of the detecting node. In MAC layer, a collision rate reporting system is established to estimate dynamic detecting threshold so as to lower the false positive rate under high network overload. We choose DSR protocol to test our algorithm and ns-2 as our simulation tool. Our experiment result verifies our theory: the average detection rate is above 90% and the false positive rate is below 10%. Moreover, the adaptive threshold strategy contributes to decreasing the false positive rate.
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paper_title: Reliability Analysis to overcome Black Hole Attack in Wireless Sensor Network

paper_content:

Wireless sensor networks are vulnerable to several attacks, one of them being the black hole attack. A black hole is a malicious node that attracts all the traffic in the network by advertising that it has the shortest path in the network. Once it receives the packet from other nodes, it drops all the packets causing loss of critical information. In this paper we propose a reliability analysis mechanism. The proposed reliability analysis scheme overcomes the shortcomings of existing cooperative black hole attack using AODV routing protocol. As soon as there is a path available for routing, its reliability is checked using the proposed scheme. The proposed reliability analysis scheme helps in achieving maximum reliability by minimizing the complexity of the system. The final path available after the reliability analysis using the proposed scheme will make the path secure enough to minimize the packet loss, end-to-end delay and the energy utilization of the network as well as maximize the network lifetime in return.
---
paper_title: Denial of Service Attacks in Wireless Ad hoc Networks

paper_content:

During the past decade, the speed and reliability of communication over wireless network has been increased drastically . One area of great interest in distributed system is wireless ad-hoc network (WANETs) that allows collaboration in real time. Wireless ad hoc networks are formed by a set of hosts that communicate with each other over a wireless channel. Denials of Service attacks are real threat to wireless systems such as WANETs. This paper provides a survey of these attacks in WANETs.
---
paper_title: Analysis of a denial of service attack on TCP

paper_content:

The paper analyzes a network based denial of service attack for IP (Internet Protocol) based networks. It is popularly called SYN flooding. It works by an attacker sending many TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) connection requests with spoofed source addresses to a victim's machine. Each request causes the targeted host to instantiate data structures out of a limited pool of resources. Once the target host's resources are exhausted, no more incoming TCP connections can be established, thus denying further legitimate access. The paper contributes a detailed analysis of the SYN flooding attack and a discussion of existing and proposed countermeasures. Furthermore, we introduce a new solution approach, explain its design, and evaluate its performance. Our approach offers protection against SYN flooding for all hosts connected to the same local area network, independent of their operating system or networking stack implementation. It is highly portable, configurable, extensible, and requires neither special hardware, nor modifications in routers or protected end systems.
---
paper_title: Analysis of a denial of service attack on TCP

paper_content:

The paper analyzes a network based denial of service attack for IP (Internet Protocol) based networks. It is popularly called SYN flooding. It works by an attacker sending many TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) connection requests with spoofed source addresses to a victim's machine. Each request causes the targeted host to instantiate data structures out of a limited pool of resources. Once the target host's resources are exhausted, no more incoming TCP connections can be established, thus denying further legitimate access. The paper contributes a detailed analysis of the SYN flooding attack and a discussion of existing and proposed countermeasures. Furthermore, we introduce a new solution approach, explain its design, and evaluate its performance. Our approach offers protection against SYN flooding for all hosts connected to the same local area network, independent of their operating system or networking stack implementation. It is highly portable, configurable, extensible, and requires neither special hardware, nor modifications in routers or protected end systems.
---
paper_title: Packet leashes: a defense against wormhole attacks in wireless networks

paper_content:

As mobile ad hoc network applications are deployed, security emerges as a central requirement. In this paper, we introduce the wormhole attack, a severe attack in ad hoc networks that is particularly challenging to defend against. The wormhole attack is possible even if the attacker has not compromised any hosts, and even if all communication provides authenticity and confidentiality. In the wormhole attack, an attacker records packets (or bits) at one location in the network, tunnels them (possibly selectively) to another location, and retransmits them there into the network. The wormhole attack can form a serious threat in wireless networks, especially against many ad hoc network routing protocols and location-based wireless security systems. For example, most existing ad hoc network routing protocols, without some mechanism to defend against the wormhole attack, would be unable to find routes longer than one or two hops, severely disrupting communication. We present a new, general mechanism, called packet leashes, for detecting and thus defending against wormhole attacks, and we present a specific protocol, called TIK, that implements leashes.
---
paper_title: TrueLink: A Practical Countermeasure to the Wormhole Attack in Wireless Networks

paper_content:

In a wormhole attack, wireless transmissions are recorded at one location and replayed at another, creating a virtual link under attacker control. Proposed counter-measures to this attack use tight clock synchronization, specialized hardware, or overhearing, making them difficult to realize in practice. TrueLink is a timing based countermeasure to the wormhole attack. Using TrueLink, a node i can verify the existence of a direct link to an apparent neighbor, j. Verification of a link i harr j operates in two phases. In the rendezvous phase, the nodes exchange nonces alphaj and betai. This is done with tight timing constraints, within which it is impossible for attackers to forward the exchange between distant nodes. In the authentication phase, i and j transmit a signed message (alphaj,betai), mutually authenticating themselves as the originator of their respective nonce. TrueLink does not rely on precise clock synchronization, GPS coordinates, overhearing, geometric inconsistencies, or statistical methods. It can be implemented using only standard IEEE 802.11 hardware with a minor backwards compatible firmware update. TrueLink is meant to be used together with a secure routing protocol. Such protocols require an authentication mechanism, which will also be used by TrueLink. TrueLink is virtually independent of the routing protocol used. Our performance evaluation shows that TrueLink provides effective protection against potentially devastating wormhole attacks.
---
paper_title: Hello Flood Attack and its Countermeasures in Wireless Sensor Networks

paper_content:

Wireless sensor network have emerged as an important application of the ad-hoc networks paradigm, such as for monitoring physical environment. These sensor networks have limitations of system resources like battery power, communication range and processing capability. Low processing power and wireless connectivity make such networks vulnerable to various types of network attacks. One of them is hello flood attack, in which an adversary, which is not a legal node in the network, can flood hello request to any legitimate node and break the security of WSN. The current solutions for these types of attacks are mainly cryptographic, which suffer from heavy computational complexity. Hence they are less suitable for wireless sensor networks. In this paper a method based on signal strength has been proposed to detect and prevent hello flood attack. Nodes have been classified as friend and stranger based on the signal strength. Short client puzzles that require less computational power and battery power have been used to check the validity of suspicious nodes.
---
paper_title: Signal Strength based Hello Flood Attack Detection and Prevention in Wireless Sensor Networks

paper_content:

Wireless sensor network is a highly distributed network of small lightweight wireless sensor nodes, deployed in large numbers to monitor the environment or system. These sensor networks have limitations of system resources like battery power, radio range and processing capability. Low processing power and wireless connectivity make such networks vulnerable to various attacks like sink hole, black hole, Sybil attacks, selective forwarding, worm hole, hello flood etc. Among these hello flood attack is an important attack on the network layer, in which an adversary, which is not a legal node in the network, can flood hello request to any legitimate node using high transmission power and break the security of WSNs. The current solutions for this type of attack are mainly cryptographic, which suffer from heavy computational complexity. Hence these are less suitable in terms of memory and battery power. In this paper a method has been proposed to detect and prevent hello flood attack using signal strength of received Hello messages. Nodes have been classified as friend and stranger based on the signal strength of Hello messages sent by them. Nodes classified as stranger are further validated by sending a simple test packet; if the reply of test packet comes back in a predefined time then it is treated as valid otherwise it is treated as malicious. The algorithm is implemented in ns-2 by modifying the AODVrouting protocol. The performance of algorithm has been tested under different network scenarios. The simulation results show improved performance of the new algorithm in terms of number of packet delivery ratio as compare to AODV with hello flood attack.
---
paper_title: Wireless sensor networks: a survey

paper_content:

This paper describes the concept of sensor networks which has been made viable by the convergence of micro-electro-mechanical systems technology, wireless communications and digital electronics. First, the sensing tasks and the potential sensor networks applications are explored, and a review of factors influencing the design of sensor networks is provided. Then, the communication architecture for sensor networks is outlined, and the algorithms and protocols developed for each layer in the literature are explored. Open research issues for the realization of sensor networks are also discussed.
---
paper_title: CHEMAS: Identify suspect nodes in selective forwarding attacks

paper_content:

Selective forwarding attacks may corrupt some mission-critical applications such as military surveillance and forest fire monitoring in wireless sensor networks. In such attacks, most of the time malicious nodes behave like normal nodes but will from time to time selectively drop sensitive packets, such as a packet reporting the movement of the opposing forces, and thereby make it harder to detect their malicious nature. In this paper, we propose CHEMAS (CHEckpoint-based Multi-hop Acknowledgement Scheme), a lightweight security scheme for detecting selective forwarding attacks. Our scheme can randomly select part of intermediate nodes along a forwarding path as checkpoint nodes which are responsible for generating acknowledgements for each packet received. The strategy of random-checkpoint-selection significantly increases the resilience against attacks because it prevents a proportion of the sensor nodes from becoming the targets of attempts to compromise them. In our scheme, each intermediate node in a forwarding path, if it does not receive enough acknowledgements from the downstream checkpoint nodes, has the potential to detect abnormal packet loss and identify suspect nodes. We explore the feasibility of our detection scheme using both theoretical analysis and simulations. The simulation results show that our scheme can achieve a high detection rate, even in harsh radio conditions. The communication overhead incurred by our scheme is also within reasonable bounds.
---

Title: Routing Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey
Section 1: INTRODUCTION
Description 1: This section introduces Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), their applications, the issues with security due to nodes being deployed in hostile environments, and the structure of the paper.

Section 2: SECURITY GOALS IN WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS
Description 2: This section discusses the primary and secondary security goals in WSNs, including data confidentiality, data authentication, data availability, data integrity, data freshness, self-organization, time synchronization, and secure localization.

Section 3: ATTACKS IN WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS
Description 3: This section categorizes and describes different types of attacks in WSNs, focusing on passive attacks and active attacks.

Section 4: ROUTING ATTACKS IN WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS
Description 4: This section delves into various routing attacks that operate on the network layer, including Sybil attack, black hole attack, denial of service attack, wormhole attack, hello flood attack, and grey hole attack.

Section 5: COUNTERMEASURES AGAINST ROUTING ATTACKS
Description 5: This section details the different countermeasures and defense mechanisms that are proposed or implemented to mitigate routing attacks in WSNs.

Section 6: COMPARISON OF ATTACKS
Description 6: This section compares the routing attacks based on parameters such as the number of packets corrupted and lost, providing an analysis of the extent of harm each attack can cause.

Section 7: CONCLUSION
Description 7: This section summarizes the survey, reiterates the importance of securing WSNs, reviews the discussion on attacks and their countermeasures, and provides a perspective for future research.