New Framework for a Hierarchical Intrusion Detection Mechanism in Cluster-Based Wireless Sensor Networks

In the last years, the technological evolution in the field of Wireless Sensor Networks was impressive, which made them extremely useful in various applications (military, commercial, etc.). In such applications, it is essential to protect the sensor network from malicious attacks. This presents a demand for providing security mechanisms in these vulnerable networks. In this paper, we design a new framework for intrusion detection in cluster-based wireless sensor networks (CWSN). In CWSN, all sensor nodes are clustered, and a Cluster Head (CH) is elected to manage the operation of its own cluster. Some sensor nodes in the cluster are elected as IDS (Intrusion detection system) agents in order to monitor the network and prevent before the intruder begins starts to the attack. This hierarchical framework is composed of different protocols that run at different levels. The first protocol is a specification-based detection protocol that runs at IDS agents (low level). The second one is a binary classification detection protocol that runs at CHs nodes (medium level). In addition, a reputation protocol is used at each CH to evaluate the trustworthiness level of its IDSs agents. Each CH monitors its CH neighbors based on a specification detection protocol with a the help of a vote mechanism applied at the base station (high level). We evaluated the performances of our framework in the presence of four kinds of attacks: hello floods, selective forwarding, black hole, and wormhole attacks. We evaluated specifically the detection rate, false positive rate, energy consumption, and efficiency. Simulation results show that our detection framwork exhibits a high detection rate (almost 100%), low number of false positives, a less time to detect the attack, and a less energy consumption.Copyright c ⃝ 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.