DDoS attacks in WSNs: detection and countermeasures

• Published in: IET wireless sensor systems 2018-04, Vol.8 (2), p.52-59
• Main Authors: Abidoye, Ademola P, Obagbuwa, Ibidun C
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: automotive industry; base station; computer network security; DDoS attack; distributed denial of service attack; environmental monitoring; event detection; health care system; message analyser scheme; mobile sensor node; open space surveillance; protocol; Research Article; smart parking; static sensor node; wireless sensor network; wireless sensor networks; WSN
• ISSN: 2043-6386; 2043-6394; 2043-6394
• DOI: 10.1049/iet-wss.2017.0029

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been widely applied in many areas for real-time event detection. They are designed using both mobile and static sensor nodes (SNs) for different applications such as smart parking, environmental monitoring, health care systems, automotive industries, sports, open space surveillance, and so on. WSNs communicate through wireless mediums and are accessible to anyone, which make SNs susceptible to different types of attacks. Distributed denial of service (DDoS) is one such attack. It wastes the limited energy of SNs and causes loss of data packets within a network. A DDoS attack launches a coordinated attack by flooding the target nodes with bogus requests, thus exhausting their resources, and forcing them to deny service to legitimate member nodes. In this study, the authors propose a message analyser scheme for WSNs. The method is capable of detecting compromised SNs vulnerable to a DDoS attack. In addition, it is able to detect all compromised messages transmitted by the attackers to the base station through the sender nodes. The proposed method is compared with other related protocols. The results show that their method can effectively detect and defend against DDoS attacks in WSNs.