A defense mechanism against clone wars in hierarchical based wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks are susceptible to clone attack due to open deployment of sensor nodes in hostile environment and lack of physical shielding. Node clone is an attempt where an adversary physically compromises a node, extract all the credentials such as keys, identity and stored codes, make hardware replicas with the captured information and introduce them at specified positions in the network. If no detection mechanism is employed then the network is vulnerable to many insidious attacks such as signal jamming, insert false information, cluster reformation and network monitoring that challenge the sensor applications. In this work we propose a mechanism based on the use of node ID and location information to detect replicated nodes by the base station in hierarchical based networks. The scheme is based on the centralized approach. The security analysis of the protocol is also presented that detects the attack in different cases.