On Identifying Power Control Performing Sybil Nodes in Wireless Sensor Networks Using RSSI

In a sybil attack, the adversary compromises nodes in the network and assigns them multiple fake identities, commonly referred to as sybil identities. Sybil node attacks can be crippling for a wireless sensor network, which operates under the 'majority is right' assumption. As the sybil nodes behave as normal nodes they are hard to identify. With the nodes in the network being able to regulate their transmission power, identification of sybil nodes becomes more difficult. This is because, the existing identification techniques, which depend on localization of the nodes, will localize the transmission power regulating sybil nodes at positions that are different from the positions of their corresponding compromised nodes. Consequently, it is difficult to differentiate the sybil node from a normal node. In this paper, we propose an enhanced RSSI-based technique to identify sybil nodes when they are regulating their transmission power.We also prove a necessary condition on the placement of the SNs in the network to guarantee zero false positives. Simulation results show that our technique is able to identify more than 98% of the sybil nodes in the network on an average, while suffering from very low false positives.