Selective Forwarding Attacks Detection in WSNs
Naser M. Alajmi, Khaled M. Elleithy · 2025
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are susceptible to the most security attacks.Limited capacity of sensor nodes accounts for the security attacks on WSNs.Applications such as military surveillance, traffic surveillance, healthcare, and environmental monitoring are impacted by security attacks.Hence, researchers have created various types of detection approaches against such attacks.There are also some limitations such as reliability, energy efficiency, and scalability, which affect sensor nodes.These limitations mostly affect the security of WSNs.Selective forwarding attack is an example of an attack that is not easily detected particularly in the networks layer.In this type of attack, malicious nodes function in the same way as other nodes in the networks.However, it tries to drops the sensitive packets prior to transferring the packet to other sensor node.In this paper, we propose an approach that protects data from selective forwarding attacks.The approach keeps the data transmission moving safely between sensor nodes and at the same time detects malicious nodes. K eywor dsWireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and Selective Forwarding Attacks. I ntr oductionWireless sensor networks contain numerous sensors.These sensors communicate with huge numbers of small nodes by using radio links.Sensor networks consist of the source and base station.A sensor is composed of four basic units, which are sensing unit, processing, transceiver, and power 1 .The task of sensor nodes is collecting the information that is needed by smart environments.These environments are for instance: home, transportation system, military, healthcare, buildings etc.The study of the Wireless Sensor Network is crucial in computer science and engineering and has an impact on the community, in economic, and industrialization.Nowadays, many distributed sensor networks can be deployed and have a self-organizing ability.Computational ability needs the sensor nodes, which are not overloaded with too many complicated functions.WSNs work in open networks with the limited resources of nodes and obstacles.Thus, they are prone to many types of attacks.The security of WSNs has been studied over the past few years.The most traditional threats include eavesdropping, nodes being compromised, interruptions, modified or injected malicious packets, compromised privacy and the denial of service attacks 2 .Networks have different applications that comprise of several levels of monitoring, tracking, and controlling.Therefore, applications are employed for specific purposes.In military applications, sensor nodes include monitoring, battlefield surveillance, and object tracking.The battlefield