Quarantine region scheme to mitigate spam attacks in wireless sensor networks

Coşkun, Vedat and Çayırcı, Erdal and Levi, Albert and Sancak, Serdar (2006) Quarantine region scheme to mitigate spam attacks in wireless sensor networks. IEEE transactions on mobile computing, 5 (8). pp. 1074-1086. ISSN 1536-1233

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Abstract

The Quarantine Region Scheme (QRS) is introduced to defend against spam attacks in wireless sensor networks where malicious antinodes frequently generate dummy spam messages to be relayed toward the sink. The aim of the attacker is the exhaustion of the sensor node batteries and the extra delay caused by processing the spam messages. Network-wide message authentication may solve this problem with a cost of cryptographic operations to be performed over all messages. QRS is designed to reduce this cost by applying authentication only whenever and wherever necessary. In QRS, the nodes that detect a nearby spam attack assume themselves to be in a quarantine region. This detection is performed by intermittent authentication checks. Once quarantined, a node continuously applies authentication measures until the spam attack ceases. In the QRS scheme, there is a tradeoff between the resilience against spam attacks and the number of authentications. Our experiments show that, in the worst-case scenario that we considered, a not quarantined node catches 80 percent of the spam messages by authenticating only 50 percent of all messages that it processes
Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: network-level security and protection; wireless sensor networks; authentication; quarantine region; spam attacks
Subjects: T Technology > TK Electrical engineering. Electronics Nuclear engineering
Divisions: Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences
Depositing User: Albert Levi
Date Deposited: 15 Dec 2006 02:00
Last Modified: 04 Sep 2019 11:10
URI: https://research.sabanciuniv.edu/id/eprint/81

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