Traceback in wireless sensor networks with packet marking and logging

Abstract

In a hostile environment, sensor nodes may be compromised and then be used to launch various attacks. One severe attack is false data injection which is becoming a serious threat to wireless sensor networks. An attacker uses the compromised node to flood the network and exhaust network resources by injecting a large number of bogus packets. In this paper, we study how to locate the attack node using a framework of packet marking and packet logging. We propose a combined packet marking and logging scheme for traceback (CPMLT). In CPMLT, one packet can be marked by up to M nodes, each node marks a packet with certain probability. When one packet is marked by M nodes, the next marking node will log this packet. Through combining packet marking and logging, we can reconstruct the entire attack path to locate the attack node by collecting enough packets. In our simulation, CPMLT achieves fast traceback with little logging overhead.

Keywords

wireless sensor networks / traceback / packet marking / packet logging

References

[1] Culler D, Estrin D, Srivastava M. Overview of sensor networks. IEEE Computer Magazine, 2004, 37(8): 41-49

[2] Szewczyk R, Osterweil E, Polastre J, Hamilton M, Mainwaring A, Estrin D. Application driven systems research: habitat monitoring with sensor networks. Communications of the ACM, 2004, 47(6): 34-40

[3] Zhu S, Setia S, Jajodia S, Ning P. An interleaved hop-by-hop authentication scheme for filtering of injected false data in sensor networks. In: Proceedings of 2004 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. 2004, 259-271

[4] Yang H, Ye F, Yuan Y, Lu S, Arbaugh W. Toward resilient security in wireless sensor networks. In: Proceedings of 6th ACM International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing. 2005, 34-45

[5] Ye F, Yang H, Liu Z. Catching “moles” in sensor networks. In: Proceedings of 27th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems. 2007

[6] Sy D, Bao L. CAPTRA: coordinated packet traceback. In: Proceedings of 5th International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks. 2006, 152-159

[7] Savage S, Wetherall D, Karlin A, Anderson T. Practical network support for IP traceback. In: Proceedings of 2000 SIGCOMM. 2000, 295-306

[8] Snoeren A C, Partridge C, Sanchez L A, Jones C E, Tchakountio F, Kent S T, Timothy Strayer W. Hash-based IP traceback. In: Proceedings of 2001 SIGCOMM. 2001, 3-14

[9] Song D, Perrig A. Advanced and authenticated marking schemes for IP traceback. In: Proceedings of 20th IEEE INFOCOM. 2001, 878-886

[10] Li J, Sung M, Xu J, Li L, Zhao Q. Large-scale IP traceback in high-speed internet: practical techniques and theoretical foundation. In: Proceedings of 2004 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. 2004, 115-129

[11] Burch H, Cheswick B. Tracing anonymous packets to their approximate source. In: Proceedings of 14th USENIX conference on System administration. 2000, 319-328

[12] Garber L. Denial-of-service attacks Rip the internet. Computer, 2000, 33(4): 12-17

[13] Karp B, Kung H T. Gpsr: greedy perimeter stateless routing for wireless networks. In: Proceedings of 2000 ACM International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking. 2000, 243-254

[14] Kim Y J, Govindan R, Karp B, Shenker S. Geographic routing made practical. In: Proceedings of 2nd USENIX Symposium on Network Design and Implementation. 2005, 217-230

[15] Fonseca R, Ratnasamy S, Zhao J, Tien Ee C, Culler D, Shenker S, Stoica I. Beacon vector routing: scalable point-to-point routing in wireless sensornets. In: Proceedings of 2nd USENIX Symposium on Network Design and Implementation. 2005, 329-342

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Shen Wei and Weiwei Wu for helpful discussions and comments. We also thank the reviewers for their comments. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 60873221).

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

2014 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg