Contact-Based Traceback in Wireless Sensor Networks

Sensor nodes can be compromised by attackers to launch various attacks, one of which is false data injection attack The attacker injects large amount of bogus data through the compromised node. This will lead to network resources exhaustion. We propose a novel contact-based approach (CTrace) to traceback to the attack origins. In CTrace, each node maintains information of its neighbors in proximity of radius R hops. The node at R hops away is called contact. With certain probability, each node marks its identification information into an arriving packet. By collecting a few packets, each node is able to construct a partial attack path back to one of its contact. CTrace build the whole attack path using a series of REQ and PATHSEG message exchanges between a sensor node and its contact. CTrace requires only a small number of packets to track down the source node injecting false data.