UnMask: Utilizing neighbor monitoring for attack mitigation in multihop wireless sensor networks

Sensor networks enable a wide range of applications in both military and civilian domains. However, the deployment scenarios, the functionality requirements, and the limited capabilities of these networks expose them to a wide-range of attacks against control traffic (such as wormholes, rushing, Sybil attacks, etc) and data traffic (such as selective forwarding). In this paper we propose a framework called UNMASK that mitigates such attacks by detecting, diagnosing, and isolating the malicious nodes. UNMASK uses as a fundamental building block the ability of a node to oversee its neighboring nodes’ communication. On top of UNMASK, we build a secure routing protocol, LSR, that provides additional protection against malicious nodes by supporting multiple node-disjoint paths. We analyze the security guarantees of UNMASK and use ns-2 simulations to show its effectiveness against representative control and data attacks. The overhead analysis we present shows that UNMASK is a lightweight protocol appropriate for securing resource constrained sensor networks.