Coordination and Selfishness in Attacks on Visual Sensor Networks

Event-driven visual sensor networks consist of collaborating camera nodes and scalar sensors which aid in the detection of events of interest in the environment. This collaboration is significant since the camera nodes generally utilize lightweight image processing in order to determine if a frame is relevant to the given application. The reliability of the supporting scalar sensor however may be compromised by an actuation attack which perturbs the sensor´s measurements. In this work we examine the achievable actuation of hostile nodes that are not globally coordinated and that may be selfish or untrustworthy in their preferences. We compare our findings with existing research which assumes that all the hostile nodes are coordinated to actuate with the same parameter. We determine that given certain conditions, local optimization may actually result in a stronger stealthy attack than the global coordination case.