A New Protocol for Securing Wireless Sensor Networks against Nodes Replication Attacks

The low-cost, unattended nature and the capability of self-organizing of sensors, yield the use of wireless sensor networks (WSN) very popular to day. Unfortunately, the unshielded nature of sensors, their deployment in remote open (hostile) areas, and the use of wireless transmission medium, make them subject to several kind of threats and attacks, like eavesdropping, intrusion, deny of services (DoS) attacks and nodes compromising. While most of threats and attacks can be prevented using cryptographic materials (i.e. shared pair- wise secret keys, certificates, etc.) provided by key management protocols, some other threats, like nodes replication attacks, can still go undetectable. Nodes replication attacks are harmful attacks, where an attacker compromising a node, uses its secret cryptographic key materials to successfully populate the network with several clones of it, in-order to gain the control over the network or disturb the normal operation of the network. Several nodes replication detection protocols were proposed in the literature, but unfortunately, they require either a high computation, transmission and energy overheads, or that nodes know their exact locations coordinates, which limits their usability in most WSN scenarios. In this paper, we present a new protocol for securing and preventing against nodes replication attacks in static WSN, which requires no knowledge of nodes deployment locations, and introduces no significant overhead on the resource-constrained sensors.