Detection of Blackhole and Sinkhole Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks Using a Lightweight Secure Protocol

Abstract: Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are widely used in critical applications such as environmental monitoring, healthcare, and industrial automation, where secure and reliable data transmission is essential. However, due to resource constraints and unattended deployment, WSNs are highly vulnerable to routing attacks such as blackhole and sinkhole attacks. This paper proposes a simple and lightweight trust-based security protocol designed to detect and isolate malicious nodes with minimal computational and communication overhead. The protocol operates in three key stages: neighbour monitoring, trust evaluation, and secure route selection. In the monitoring phase, nodes locally observe the packet forwarding behaviour of their one-hop neighbours. A combined trust score is then computed using forwarding reliability and traffic consistency metrics to accurately identify malicious behaviour. Nodes with low trust scores are isolated through a distributed blacklist mechanism. Finally, secure routing decisions are made by selecting nodes with high trust values and sufficient residual energy, ensuring both reliability and energy efficiency. The proposed approach effectively detects both blackhole and sinkhole attacks while maintaining low overhead, making it suitable for resource- constrained WSN environments.

Keywords: WSN, Secure Routing, Lightweight Protocol, Forwarding Ratio, Malicious Node Detection.