Prevention of node replication in Wireless Sensor Network using Received Signal Strength Indicator, Link Quality Indicator and Packet Sequence Number

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) has witnessed tremendous progress in the domain of processing power enhancement and improvement in sensing capabilities and wireless communications. With more critically important applications being designed for the WSN, security becomes a matter of prime importance. Though a lot of work has been carried out in the field of security for WSN, yet providing a robust security framework remains an open research challenge. One such open research domain is prevention of node replication attack, where the adversary takes control of a node from the network and steals all the security related credentials like node identity, keys, keying mechanism etc. and generates duplicate clones of the compromised node with the same security parameters. Building a defence mechanism against such node replication attacks has become an important research topic. The design principles has given directions to more threatening and different challenges which are more difficult to detect then typical attacks that are application dependent. There are several protocols that have been documented regarding node replication attacks. However, in depth study of this protocols reveal that robust prevention mechanism against such kind of attack is debatable and several vulnerabilities exist. In this paper, we propose a Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI), Link Quality Indicator (LQI) and Packet Sequence Number based protocol that allows the legitimate nodes to detect the presence of any adversary placed clone node, and reporting it back to the base station thereby preventing a node duplication attack.