A Statistical Approach to Detect Jamming Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), in recent times, have become one of the most promising network solutions with a wide variety of applications in the areas of agriculture, environment, healthcare and the military. Notwithstanding these promising applications, sensor nodes in WSNs are vulnerable to di...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Switzerland), 2018-05, Vol.18 (6), p.1691
Main Authors: Osanaiye, Opeyemi, Alfa, Attahiru S, Hancke, Gerhard P
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Change detection
exponentially weighted moving average
inter-arrival time
Jamming
jamming attack
Military applications
Nodes
Process controls
Radio signals
Remote sensors
Sensors
Statistical process control
Wireless sensor networks
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Summary:Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), in recent times, have become one of the most promising network solutions with a wide variety of applications in the areas of agriculture, environment, healthcare and the military. Notwithstanding these promising applications, sensor nodes in WSNs are vulnerable to different security attacks due to their deployment in hostile and unattended areas and their resource constraints. One of such attacks is the DoS jamming attack that interferes and disrupts the normal functions of sensor nodes in a WSN by emitting radio frequency signals to jam legitimate signals to cause a denial of service. In this work we propose a step-wise approach using a statistical process control technique to detect these attacks. We deploy an exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) to detect anomalous changes in the intensity of a jamming attack event by using the packet inter-arrival feature of the received packets from the sensor nodes. Results obtained from a trace-driven simulation show that the proposed solution can efficiently and accurately detect jamming attacks in WSNs with little or no overhead.
ISSN:1424-8220
1424-8220
DOI:10.3390/s18061691