Two-Hop Monitoring Mechanism Based on Relaxed Flow Conservation Constraints against Selective Routing Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we investigate the problem of selective routing attack in wireless sensor networks by considering a novel threat, named the upstream-node effect, which limits the accuracy of the monitoring functions in deciding whether a monitored node is legitimate or malicious. To address this limitation, we propose a one-dimensional one-class classifier, named relaxed flow conservation constraint, as an intrusion detection scheme to counter the upstream node attack. Each node uses four types of relaxed flow conservation constraints to monitor all of its neighbors. Three constraints are applied by using one-hop knowledge, and the fourth one is calculated by monitoring two-hop information. The latter is obtained by proposing two-hop energy-efficient and secure reporting scheme. We theoretically analyze the security and performance of the proposed intrusion detection method. We also show the superiority of relaxed flow conservation constraint in defending against upstream node attack compared to other schemes. The simulation results show that the proposed intrusion detection system achieves good results in terms of detection effectiveness.