• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
• /
• v.32 no.6
• /
• pp.1165-1170
• /
• 2022

In WSNs, a clustering algorithm groups sensor nodes on a unit called cluster and periodically selects a cluster head (CH) that acts as a communication relay on behalf of nodes in each cluster for the purpose of energy conservation and relay efficiency. Meanwhile, attack techniques also have emerged to intervene in the CH election process through compromised nodes (inside attackers) and have a fatal impact on network operation. However, existing countermeasures such as encryption key-based methods against outside attackers have a limitation to defend against such inside attackers. Therefore, we propose a statistical detection method that detects abnormal CH election behaviors occurs in a WSN cluster. We design two attack methods (Selfish and Greedy attacks) and our proposed defense method in WSNs with two clustering algorithms and conduct experiments to validate our proposed defense method works well against those attacks.