Securing Topology Maintenance Protocols for Sensor Networks: Attacks and Countermeasures
Andrea Gabrielli, Luigi Vincenzo Mancini, Sanjeev K. Setia, Sushil Jajodia · 2005
We analyze the security vulnerabilities of PEAS, AS-CENT, and CCP, three well-known topology maintenance protocols for sensor networks. These protocols aim to in-crease the lifetime of the sensor network by maintaining only a subset of nodes in an active or awake state. The design of these protocols assumes that the sensor nodes will be deployed in a trusted non-adversarial environment, and does not take into account the impact of attacks launched by malicious insider and outsider nodes. We describe three at-tacks against these protocols that can be used to reduce the lifetime of the sensor network, or to degrade the functional-ity of the sensor application by reducing the network con-nectivity and sensing coverage that can be achieved. Fur-ther, we describe counter-measures that can be used to in-crease the robustness of the protocols and make them re-silient to such attacks. 1