Spoofing prevention using received signal strength for ZigBee-based home area networks

In this paper we present a novel spoofing prevention system (SPS) for ZigBee based home area networks (HANs) within smart grids. The proposed SPS uses the spatial correlation of received signal strength (RSS) in order to detect attacks and filter malicious frames. The SPS consists of a spoofing detection module which is installed on the security center in the HAN, as well as spoofing prevention agents installed on network nodes. Once an attack is detected, the agents differentiate and filter malicious frames by analyzing the RSS values of received frames. Two methods are introduced and investigated for attack prevention, static threshold and dynamic threshold. The former has very low computational requirements, yet due to high false positive rate introduces some network overhead during the attack. The latter needs more computations; however, it has a higher performance and a very low network overhead. The soundness of the proposed method is proved through both theoretical analysis, as well as experiments.