Design and implementation of an intrusion detection system for wireless sensor networks

As a relatively recent and emerging technology, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are beginning to be deployed frequently in a wide variety of environments ranging from military and emergency environments to natural and embedded environments. For example, a security system may be deployed using WSNs as outlined in M. Turon, J. Suh (Apr. 2005), and P. Dutta., et al., (Apr. 2005). Furthermore, WSNs are of particular interest to adversaries due to their frequent deployments in open and unprotected environments. Preventive mechanisms can sometimes be applied to protect WSNs from an assortment of attacks. However, in many cases, a more sophisticated methodology needs to be applied for situations in which intrusions or attacks cannot necessarily be anticipated in advance. In such instances, an intrusion detection system is warranted. For WSNs, one of the primary concerns deals with availability of the network and individual nodes. Denial of service (DoS) attacks are a particularly great threat to WSNs. The effects of a DoS attack are described extensively in A.D. Wood and J.A. Stankovic (Oct. 2002),and http://www.tinyos.net. WSNs are particularly vulnerable to failure under such attacks because of their limited energy, processing capacity, and storage. An effective DoS attack merely has to deplete the resources of the nodes to render them unavailable. In this paper we design and implement a preliminary intrusion detection system (IDS) for WSNs that addresses the security concern of DoS attacks and fits the demands and restrictions of WSNs.