Detecting Sinkhole Attacks in Wireless Sensor Network using Hop Count

Nowadays, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are widely used in many areas, especially in environment applications, military applications, queue tracking, etc. WSNs are vulnerable to different types of security attacks due to various constraints such as broadcasted nature of transmission medium, deployment in open or hostile environment where they are not physically protected, less memory, and limited battery power. So, security system is the crucial requirements of these networks. One of the most notably routing attacks is the sinkhole attack where an adversary captures or insert nodes in the sensor field that advertise high quality routes to the base station. In this paper, a mechanism is proposed against sinkhole attacks which detect malicious nodes using hop counting. The main advantage of the proposed technique is that, a node can detects malicious nodes only collaborating with the neighbor nodes without requiring any negotiation with the base station. Simulation result shows that, the proposed technique successfully detects the sinkhole nodes for large sensor field.