Intrusion Detection for Routing Attacks in Sensor Networks

Security is a critical challenge for creating robust and reliable sensor networks. For example, routing attacks have the ability to disconnect a sensor network from its central base station. In this paper, we present a method for intrusion detection in wireless sensor networks. Our intrusion detection scheme uses a clustering algorithm to build a model of normal traffic behaviour, and then uses this model of normal traffic to detect abnormal traffic patterns. A key advantage of our approach is that it is able to detect attacks that have not previously been seen. Moreover, our detection scheme is based on a set of traffic features that can potentially be applied to a wide range of routing attacks. In order to evaluate our intrusion detection scheme, we have extended a sensor network simulator to generate routing attacks in wireless sensor networks. We demonstrate that our intrusion detection scheme is able to achieve high detection accuracy with a low false positive rate for a variety of simulated routing attacks.