DAR: A dynamic anchor regrouping scheme for securing localization service against wormhole attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Localization in wireless sensor networks is vulnerable to wormhole attacks, in which adversaries record beacon messages at one position, transmit them through a wormhole tunnel and replay at another location. Some existing schemes against wormhole attacks either require special hardware or increase computation/communication overhead on sensors. In this paper, we propose a lightweight dynamic anchor regrouping (DAR) scheme for sensors' localization against wormhole attacks. In our scheme, anchors within some small local areas organize themselves into groups, and a sensor estimates its location using beacon messages from anchors that belong to the same group. Our scheme is lightweight because the major computation is conducted by anchors, meanwhile, no extra communication overhead is incurred on sensors. By carefully controlling the group size, DAR can greatly reduce localization errors of sensors and increase the percentage of sensors that can localize themselves.