skip to main content
10.1145/1514274.1514302acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PageswisecConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

A practical secure neighbor verification protocol for wireless sensor networks

Published: 16 March 2009 Publication History

Abstract

Wireless networking relies on a fundamental building block, neighbor discovery (ND). The nature of wireless communications, however, makes attacks against ND easy: An adversary can simply replay or relay (wormhole) packets across the network and mislead disconnected nodes into believing that they communicate directly. Such attacks can compromise the overlying protocols and applications. Proposed methods in the literature seek to secure ND, allowing nodes to verify they are neighbors. However, they either rely on specialized hardware or infrastructure, or offer limited security. In this paper, we address these problems, designing a practical and secure neighbor verification protocol for constrained Wireless Sensor networks (WSNs). Our scheme relies on estimated distance between nodes and simple geometric tests, and it is fully distributed. We prove our protocol is secure against the classic 2-end wormhole attack. Moreover, we provide a proof-of-concept implementation with off-the-shelf WSN equipment: Cricket motes.

References

[1]
H. Alzaid, S. Abanmi, S. Kanhere, and C. T. Chou. Detecting wormhole attacks in wireless sensor networks. Technical Report, Computer Science and Engineering School -- UNSW, The Network Research Laboratory, 2006.
[2]
L. Buttyán, L. Dóra, and I. Vajda. Statistical wormhole detection in sensor networks. In R. Molva, G. Tsudik, and D. Westhoff, editors, ESAS, volume 3813 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 128--141. Springer, 2005.
[3]
J. Eriksson, S. V. Krishnamurthya, and M. Faloutsos. Truelink: A practical countermeasure to the wormhole attack in wireless networks. In ICNP'06, 2006.
[4]
L. Hu and D. Evans. Using directional antennas to prevent wormhole attacks. In Symposium on Network and Distributed Systems Security (NDSS), 2004.
[5]
Y.-C. Hu, A. Perrig, and D. B. Johnson. Packet leashes: A defense against wormhole attacks in wireless ad hoc networks. In IEEE INFOCOM, 2003.
[6]
P. Levis, S. Madden, J. Polastre, R. Szewczyk, K. Whitehouse, A. Woo, D. Gay, J. Hill, M. Welsh, E. Brewer, and D. Culler. Tinyos: An operating system for sensor networks. In Ambient Intelligence. 2005.
[7]
R. Maheshwari, J. Gao, and S. R. Das. Detecting wormhole attacks in wireless networks using connectivity information. In IEEE Conference on Computer Communications INFOCOM, 2007.
[8]
M. Maróti, B. Kusy, G. Simon, and Akos Ledeczi. The flooding time synchronization protocol. In Proceedings of ACM SenSys, 2004.
[9]
F. Nait-Abdesselam, B. Bensaou, and T. Taleb. Detecting and avoiding wormhole attacks in wireless ad hoc networks. Communications Magazine, IEEE, 46(4), April 2008.
[10]
P. Papadimitratos and Z. Haas. Secure Data Communication in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks. IEEE JSAC, Special Issue on Security in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks, 24(2):343--356, 2006.
[11]
R. Poovendran and L. Lazos. A Graph Theoretic Framework for Preventing the Wormhole Attack in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks. ACM/Kluwer Wireless Networks, 13(1), 2005.
[12]
M. Poturalski, P. Papadimitratos, and J.-P. Hubaux. Secure Neighbor Discovery in Wireless Networks: Formal Investigation of Possibility. In ACM ASIACCS 2008.
[13]
K. B. Rasmussen and S. Čapkun. Implications of radio fingerprinting on the security of sensor networks. In International Conference on Security and Privacy for Emerging Areas in Communications Networks (SecureComm), 2007.
[14]
N. Sastry, U. Shankar, and D. Wagner. Secure verification of location claims. In WiSe '03: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM workshop on Wireless security. ACM, 2003.
[15]
R. Shokri, M. Poturalski, G. Ravot, P. Papadimitratos, and J.-P. Hubaux. A Low-Cost Secure Neighbor Verification Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks. Technical report, EPFL LCA-REPORT-2008-020, 2008.
[16]
A. Srinivasan and J. Wu. A Survey on Secure Localization in Wireless Sensor Networks. Encyclopedia of Wireless and Mobile Communications, 2008.
[17]
S. Čapkun, L. Buttyán, and J.-P. Hubaux. Sector: secure tracking of node encounters in multiwireless networks. In ACM workshop on Security of ad hoc and sensor networks, 2003.
[18]
W. Wang and B. Bhargava. Visualization of wormholes in sensor networks. In ACM WiSe, 2004.
[19]
K. Whitehouse, F. Jiang, A. Woo, C. Karlof, and D. Culler. Sensor field localization: a deployment and empirical analysis. Technical Report UCB//CSD-04-1349, Univ. of California, Berkeley, 2004.
[20]
G. Zhou, T. He, S. Krishnamurthy, and J. A. Stankovic. Models and solutions for radio irregularity in wireless sensor networks. ACM Transaction on Sensor Networks, 2(2):221--262, 2006.
[21]
S. Zhu, S. Setia, and S. Jajodia. Leap: efficient security mechanisms for large-scale distributed sensor networks. In CCS '03: Proceedings of the 10th ACM conference on Computer and communications security, pages 62--72, New York, NY, USA, 2003. ACM.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Secure Neighbor Discovery as a Service in the Internet of Ships EnvironmentIEEE Transactions on Services Computing10.1109/TSC.2024.340751617:5(2807-2821)Online publication date: Sep-2024
  • (2020)LoRa-Based WSNs Construction and Low-Power Data Collection Strategy for Wetland Environmental MonitoringWireless Personal Communications10.1007/s11277-020-07437-5Online publication date: 6-May-2020
  • (2020)Analysis of Wormhole Detection Features in Wireless Sensor Networks4th International Conference on Internet of Things and Connected Technologies (ICIoTCT), 201910.1007/978-3-030-39875-0_3(22-29)Online publication date: 15-Feb-2020
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. A practical secure neighbor verification protocol for wireless sensor networks

      Recommendations

      Comments

      Information & Contributors

      Information

      Published In

      cover image ACM Conferences
      WiSec '09: Proceedings of the second ACM conference on Wireless network security
      March 2009
      280 pages
      ISBN:9781605584607
      DOI:10.1145/1514274
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

      Sponsors

      Publisher

      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 16 March 2009

      Permissions

      Request permissions for this article.

      Check for updates

      Author Tags

      1. secure neighbor verification
      2. wireless sensor networks

      Qualifiers

      • Research-article

      Conference

      WISEC '09
      Sponsor:

      Acceptance Rates

      Overall Acceptance Rate 98 of 338 submissions, 29%

      Contributors

      Other Metrics

      Bibliometrics & Citations

      Bibliometrics

      Article Metrics

      • Downloads (Last 12 months)13
      • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1
      Reflects downloads up to 02 Mar 2025

      Other Metrics

      Citations

      Cited By

      View all
      • (2024)Secure Neighbor Discovery as a Service in the Internet of Ships EnvironmentIEEE Transactions on Services Computing10.1109/TSC.2024.340751617:5(2807-2821)Online publication date: Sep-2024
      • (2020)LoRa-Based WSNs Construction and Low-Power Data Collection Strategy for Wetland Environmental MonitoringWireless Personal Communications10.1007/s11277-020-07437-5Online publication date: 6-May-2020
      • (2020)Analysis of Wormhole Detection Features in Wireless Sensor Networks4th International Conference on Internet of Things and Connected Technologies (ICIoTCT), 201910.1007/978-3-030-39875-0_3(22-29)Online publication date: 15-Feb-2020
      • (2019)Secure Neighbour Discovery: Secure k-Nearest ROUTING AD-HOC Networking Using Diffie-Helman and HIGHEST Connectivity AlgorithmJournal of Communications10.12720/jcm.14.3.164-169(164-169)Online publication date: 2019
      • (2019)Classification of Security Attacks in WSNs and Possible Countermeasures: A Survey2019 IEEE International Conference on Advanced Networks and Telecommunications Systems (ANTS)10.1109/ANTS47819.2019.9118119(1-6)Online publication date: Dec-2019
      • (2019)Security Enhancement Approach in WSN to Recovering from Various Wormhole-Based DDoS AttacksInnovations in Soft Computing and Information Technology10.1007/978-981-13-3185-5_15(179-190)Online publication date: 18-Jan-2019
      • (2018)Intelligent Communication in Wireless Sensor NetworksFuture Internet10.3390/fi1009009110:9(91)Online publication date: 15-Sep-2018
      • (2018)Trustworthiness of Dynamic Moving Sensors for Secure Mobile Edge ComputingComputers10.3390/computers70400637:4(63)Online publication date: 16-Nov-2018
      • (2018)Performance Evaluation of Wireless Sensor Network in the Presence of Wormhole AttackProgress in Advanced Computing and Intelligent Engineering10.1007/978-981-13-1708-8_48(523-527)Online publication date: 18-Dec-2018
      • (2018)Detection of Wormhole Attack in Static Wireless Sensor NetworksAdvances in Computer Communication and Computational Sciences10.1007/978-981-13-0344-9_39(463-471)Online publication date: 19-Aug-2018
      • Show More Cited By

      View Options

      Login options

      View options

      PDF

      View or Download as a PDF file.

      PDF

      eReader

      View online with eReader.

      eReader

      Figures

      Tables

      Media

      Share

      Share

      Share this Publication link

      Share on social media