Adaptive active defense mechanism in wireless sensor networks

Security in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is very important. Traditional security schemes abandon compromised nodes and add a lot of redundancies to make the network resilient. These methods are not applicable to resource-limited WSNs. This paper proposes an adaptive and active defense mechanism with low power consumption. In our scheme, some nodes are configured as monitoring nodes to identify attacks; after determining the attacker, the defense system is activated and actively rescue compromised nodes. Our scheme consumes battery wisely since only a small set of nodes are selected as monitoring nodes and defense nodes are adaptively chosen to counter the attack. We also enhance the adaptive active defense mechanism by adding the functionality which allows administrators to add or change rules of defense.