Detection and Prevention of Resource Depletion Attacks in Wireless Ad Hoc Sensor Networks

Abstract: Wireless Ad Hoc Sensor Networks are the networks with will collection of wireless devices. They meant for some kind of sensing tasks. There are many real world utilities of these kinds of network. For instance, they are used for environment monitoring, studying wildlife habitat besides a plethora of military and civilian applications. These sensor networks suffer from lack of resources. In other words, they do have fewer resources such as energy. Therefore they are subjected to numerous attacks. Resource depletion attack or vampire attack is one such attack where a compromised node involves in generating more network traffic which depletes energy of the nodes. The vampire node behaves as per the underlying protocol making the network difficult to detect such attack. This is the problem to be addressed. Recently Vasserman and Hopper proposed a method to prevent “vampire attacks” in Ad Hoc Sensor Networks. Their research reveled that vampire attacks are not specific to any protocol. However, they depend on many routing protocols. In this paper we implement a prototype application that simulates the Wireless Ad Hoc Sensor Network with number of nodes and sink with the resource depletion attack model. Our empirical results reveal that the prototype is able to provide encouraging results.

Keywords: Wireless networks, denial of service, sensor networks, and resource depletion attacks