A New Approach to Detect Clone Attack in WSN

Abstract Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) has wide range of applications from defense purpose to general purpose. Because of low cost, small size and compactness of sensors, they can be deployed anywhere for important tasks. Wireless sensor networks are often deployed in the areas where they cannot be monitored easily, and they are left unattended for long time. This makes wireless sensor networks prone to different types of attacks. One of them is Clone attack. In this attack, the adversary captures and compromises legitimate node and makes the clones or replicas. Then adversary inserts those nodes inside the network. Sometimes the sensors carry confidential data with it. If these clone nodes are not quickly detected, an adversary can be further mount a variety of internal attacks. As a result, the various protocols and sensor applications get deteriorated. Several protocols have been proposed in the literature to tackle the crucial problem of clone detection, which are not satisfactory as they have some serious drawbacks. In this paper we propose a new distributed protocol called Neighbor Division Random Walk (ND-RAWL) for Clone attack detection in static WSNs. It is based on claimer-reporter-witness framework. ND-RAWL detects clone nodes with the help of a claimer-reporter-witness framework and a random walk is used within each area for the selection of witness nodes. Our simulation results show that ND-RAWL do better than the existing witness node based strategies with moderate communication overhead.