Heshem A. El Zouka, Arab Academy for Science & Technology and Maritime Transport, Egypt

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are subject to various kinds of attacks such as replaying of messages, battery exhausting, and nodes compromising. While most of these attacks can be dealt with through cryptographic security protocols provided by key management schemes, there are always a few that manage to really cause problems. One such attack that is most common and significant in WSNs is cloning attack. In clone attack, the intruder tries to capture and compromise some nodes and inject them into several locations throughout the network in order to conduct other types of attacks. Moreover, if this attack is not detected early, then these replicated injected nodes will consume a large amount of the network resources. In this paper, we analyze several key management schemes that can be used for checking integrity and preventing cloning attacks. After analyzing the problems associated with these schemes, we propose a model that allows us to distinguish between legitimate nodes and cloned nodes in such sensor networks.

Node replication; Network security; Energy efficient; clone attacks ; Key management schemes.