An Efficient and Distributed Replica Detection in Large-scale Sensor Networks

A new set of security challenges arises in sensor networks due to the fact that current sensor nodes lack hardware support for tamperresistance and are often deployed in unattended environments where they are vulnerable to capture and compromise by an adversary. A serious consequence of node compromise is that once an adversary has obtained the credentials of a sensor node, it can surreptitiously insert replicas of that node at strategic locations within the network. In this paper,.We present a novel distributed protocol for detecting node replication attacks that takes a different approach for selecting witnesses for a node. In our approach, which we call Localized Multicast, the witness nodes for a node identity are randomly selected from the nodes that are located within a geographically limited region (referred to as a cell). Our approach first deterministically maps a node’s ID to one or more cells, and then uses randomization within the cell(s) to increase the resilience and security of the scheme. One major advantage of our approach is that the probability of detecting node replicas is much higher than that achieved in protocols.