Effective Identification of Packet Droppers and Modifiers in Wireless Sensor Networks

In Wireless sensor network, sensor nodes are used to monitor physical or environmental condition. Sensor networks are often deployed in an unattended and hostile environment to perform the monitoring and data collection tasks. When it is deployed in such an environment, it lacks physical protection and subjected to node compromise. After compromising one or multiple sensor nodes, an adversary may launch various attacks to disrupt the in-network communication. Among these attacks, two common ones are dropping packets and modifying packet. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective scheme to identify misbehaving forwarders that drop or modify packets. Node Categorization algorithm and Global Ranking algorithm are used to identify compromised nodes. Encryption techniques are provided to ensure reliable communication.