Whac-A-Mole: Smart node positioning in clone attack in wireless sensor networks

Abstract Wireless sensor networks are often deployed in unattended environments and, thus, an adversary can physically capture some of the sensors, build clones with the same identity as the captured sensors, and place these clones at strategic positions in the network for further malicious activities. Such attacks, called clone attacks, are a very serious threat against the usefulness of wireless networks. Researchers proposed different techniques to detect such attacks. The most promising detection techniques are the distributed ones that scale for large networks and distribute the task of detecting the presence of clones among all sensors, thus, making it hard for a smart attacker to position the clones in such a way as to disrupt the detection process. However, even when the distributed algorithms work normally, their ability to discover an attack may vary greatly with the position of the clones. We believe this aspect has been greatly underestimated in the literature. In this paper, we present a thorough and novel study of the relation between the position of clones and the probability that the clones are detected. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first such study. In particular, we consider four algorithms that are representatives of the distributed approach. We evaluate for them whether their capability of detecting clone attacks is influenced by the positions of the clones. Since wireless sensor networks may be deployed in different situations, our study considers several possible scenarios: a uniform scenario in which the sensors are deployed uniformly, and also not uniform scenarios, in which there are one or more large areas with no sensor (we call such areas “holes”) that force communications to flow around these areas. We show that the different scenarios greatly influence the performance of the algorithms. For instance, we show that, when holes are present, there are some clone positions that make the attacks much harder to be detected. We believe that our work is key to better understand the actual security risk of the clone attack in the presence of a smart adversary and also with respect to different deployment scenarios. Moreover, our work suggests, for the different scenarios, effective clone detection solutions even when a smart adversary is part of the game.