Reinforcement Swap Attack against Directed Diffusion in Wireless Sensor Networks

Published Online March 2013 in MECS

A typical wireless sensor network is expected to give a certain data that the user is actively enquiring about after some amount of time. Many attack schemes tend to stop the proper performance of sensor networks to delay or even prevent the delivery of data requested by the user. Despite the fact that the term attack usually refers to an adversary’s attempt to disrupt, undermine, or destroy a network, a Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack refers to any event that diminishes or eliminates a network’s ability to perform its expected function [1]. Such a technique may be helpful in specific applications such as utilizing the best of these attacks to find the weak tips of presented protocols at different layers. These attacks consequently would expose weaknesses that lead to effective countermeasures. Understanding these vulnerabilities can develop techniques for identifying attacks that attempt to take advantage of them and implement mechanisms to mitigate these attacks. In other more serious applications, there are situations where network blocking is necessary to protect public safety. For example, in hostile environments disabling the communication capabilities of the enemy represents a high priority. Another example is to prevent cell phone detonation of bombs. Furthermore, denial of service attack can be used in legitimate scenarios to achieve such purpose at different layers of the protocol. However, we chose to exploit the routing layer which represents one of the famous techniques widely used for this.

Several schemes have been proposed for routing in WSNs that leverage on sensor network specific characteristics such as application requirements. Directed Diffusion (DD) [2] is one example of a generic scheme for managing the data communication requirements and thus routing in WSNs. As a sensory network protocol, Directed Diffusion is subject to many threats and risks. However, in what follows we are interested in identifying the vulnerabilities of DD due to its infrastructure architectural design (for example, its special control signals).

Although a large body of literatures dealt with Directed Diffusion vulnerabilities, the vast majority of such work was devoted to theoretically discuss DD security and the possible attack threats with no implementations of these attacks as it was the case in [3] and [4] where both papers investigate different misuse actions manipulated to attack AODV and TORA, respectively, to achieve certain attack objectives.

In [5], security in wireless sensor networks has been proposed; the authors present general classes of attacks, and analyze the security of nearly all the currently documented sensor routing protocols including DD. However, this work may be considered as an argument of DD security rather than a real simulation of an attack on DD based sensory network.

Similarly in [6], taxonomy of possible threats to DD is viewed. Some of these attacks are cloning attack, flow suppression, path influence, selective forwarding, and node inclusion/exclusion.

In [7], Kalambour addresses some of the security issues for routing in sensor networks by taking an example of the Directed Diffusion protocol for analysis of the attacks and general possible countermeasures. He classified the possible attacks on Directed Diffusion protocol under three categories: (1) denial of service attacks that have two forms to achieve either by jamming or spoofing negative reinforcement, (2) modification and spoofing of routing information in which the attacker sends spoofed events at a high data rate to the sink node or base station in order to successfully being able to include itself in the path of the base station and observes all packets sent to the base station, and (3) dropping or selective forwarding of data.