Abstract—Nowadays with the wide range of applications in wireless sensor networks, there is an increasing need for security of these networks. These networks have been subjected to numerous attacks among which Sinkhole attack is one of the notable ones. In Sinkhole attack, sometimes the adversary node poses itself as a fake base station (BS) and receives all data of the network. It prevents data from reaching the main BS, or changes the received data and then transfers them to the main BS. In this paper, we present an efficient algorithm in terms of energy consumption. In the proposed algorithm, when a node desires to send data to the BS, it firstly sends a control packet directly to the main BS. Then it begins to send data packets to the BS in form of hop by hop routing. When the data packet arrives at the BS, some of its control fields are compared with the same ones of the original control packet. If any changes have been made to these control fields of the data packet, it shows that there is a malicious node; the BS detects it using the proposed strategy. The performance of the proposed method has been evaluated and compared with that of Ngai’s algorithm. The simulation results indicate that the proposed algorithm is more efficient than it.
Index Terms—Wireless sensor networks, sinkhole attack, wormhole, base station, detection.
Maliheh Bahekmat, Ashraf Sadat Heydari Yazdi and Sanaz Sadeghi are with the Department of computer engineering, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran (e-mail: ma.bahekmat@um.ac.ir).
Mohammad Hossein Yaghmaee was with the Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, West Virginia University, Morgantown, USA.
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Cite: Maliheh Bahekmat, Mohammad Hossein Yaghmaee, Ashraf Sadat Heydari Yazdi, and Sanaz Sadeghi, "A Novel Algorithm for Detecting Sinkhole Attacks in WSNs,"
International Journal of Computer Theory and Engineering vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 418-421, 2012.
