Low-Priced and Energy-Efficient Detection of Replicas for Wireless Sensor Networks

The forthcoming internet of things - an intelligent collaboration of resource-limited devices such as wireless sensor nodes that are embedded in the daily lives of users - poses new challenges to security and end-user privacy. One of the most challenging problems is the thwarting of replica attacks. Once a sensor node is physically captured, it can be reprogrammed and replicated into a large number of replicas, which may maliciously occupy the network. Thus far, various schemes have been proposed to detect replicas; however, most of them require expensive hardware such as a global positioning system. In general, the ideal price for a sensor node is as low as one dollar, and thus, it is equipped with limited resources; hence, it is not practical to employ additional devices. In this paper, we propose a low-priced and efficient solution for replica detection in static wireless sensor networks. Although the proposed solution does not need any additional hardware, it exhibits similar or better performance, as compared to existing schemes. Through simulation experiments, we show that the proposed solution provides comparable performance in terms of the replica detection ratio and the time required to detect replicas. Furthermore, we show that the proposed solution saves more energy than existing schemes in most of our simulations.