Meenakshi Tripathi, M.S. Gaur and V. Laxmi, Malviya National Institute of Technology, India

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) consists of large number of sensor nodes capable of forming instantaneous network with dynamic topology. Each node simultaneously as both router and host. Number of nodes in a WSN can vary either due to the mobility or death of nodes due to drained conditions. Low Energy Aware Cluster Hierarchy (LEACH) is a most popular dynamic clustering protocol for WSN. Deployment in unattended environment, limited memory, limited power and low computational power of a sensor node make these networks susceptible to attacks launched by malicious nodes. This paper provides an overview of LEACH protocol and how LEACH can be compromised by malicious nodes. We propose a attack on LEACH – Snooze attack. This paper we present a way to simulate this attack on NS-2 which is demonstrative on throughput. We observe that during simulation throughput drops as an effect of attack. It is observed that the effect of the attack gets aggregated as we increase the number of attackers.