Hop-by-Hop cooperative detection of selective forwarding attacks in energy harvesting wireless sensor networks

Due to the lack of physical protections and security requirements of the network routing protocols, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are vulnerable to Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks. Inherent resource constraints also hinder WSNs from deploying conventional encryption schemes and secure routing protocols. In this paper, we investigate a counter selective forwarding attack to efficiently detect the forwarding misbehaviors of malicious nodes and seamlessly deliver sensory data in energy harvesting WSNs. We first analyze a set of adversarial scenarios under an implicit acknowledgment overhearing and identify a vulnerable case. Then we propose a Hop-by-hop Cooperative Detection (HCD) scheme to efficiently detect the forwarding misbehaviors and mitigate the forwarding probabilities of malicious nodes. Extensive simulation results indicate that the proposed scheme can significantly reduce the number of forwarding misbehaviors by quickly decreasing the dropping probabilities of malicious nodes and achieve more than 95% packet delivery ratio in energy harvesting WSNs.