Secure APIT Localization Scheme Against Sybil Attacks in Distributed Wireless Sensor Networks

For location-aware applications in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), it is important to ensure that sensor nodes can get correct locations in a hostile WSNs. Sybil attacks, which are vital threats in WSNs, especially in the distributed WSNs. They can forge one or multiple identities to decrease the localization accuracy, or sometimes to collapse the whole localization systems. In this paper, a novel lightweight sybil-free (SF)-APIT algorithm is presented to solve the problem of sybil attacks in APIT localization scheme, which is a popular range-free method and performs at individual node in a purely distributed fashion. The proposed SF-APIT scheme requires minimal overhead for wireless devices and works well based on the received signal strength. Simulations demonstrate that SF-APIT is an effective scheme in detecting and defending against sybil attacks with a high detection rate in distributed wireless localization schemes.