Attacks Against Virtual Coordinate System Based Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensornet designs have evolved in recent years, from primarily focusing on data collection to more sophisticated tasks such as data centric storage [7]. Likewise, the requirements on the network support have also changed, from the basic many-to-one and one-to-many communications to more sophisticated point-to-point communications. To address the unique challenges for point-to-point routing in the sensornets, virtual coordinate system (VCS) based routing protocols have been developed. Compared to the traditional routing protocols, VCS-based routing protocols are proactive protocols that have the attractive properties of operating via only local interactions and requiring state information that does not grow with the size of the network. Although there have been many proposed VCS-based routing protocols in the literature [1], [2], [3], [6], there has been little work that investigates the security of such protocols. However, as our experimental results have shown, the VCSbased routing protocols are particularly sensitive to attacks. It is possible for a small number of attacker nodes to jeopardize the routing operations of a significant portion of the network. Thus, it is paramount that we provide security mechanisms in these protocols if the target deployment environment is potentially malicious. In this project, we address the problem of securing VCS-routing protocols. As a first step, we focus on the security threats against such protocols. More specifically, we will present the following contributions: • We abstract a common framework for VCS-based routing based on the characteristics of existing protocols • We identify attacks against VCS-based routing protocols based on the common framework • We evaluate experimentally the impact of the attacks to demonstrate the necessity of security mechanisms