Hash Based Sinkhole Attack Detection Scheme For Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper investigates one of the most severe routing attacks in sensor networks, namely sinkhole attack. A compromised node tries to draw all or as much traffic as possible from a particular area, by making it look attractive to the surrounding nodes with respect to the underlying routing metric. The detection of sinkhole attack in wireless sensor networks is proposed using an enhanced double davismayer scheme that utilizes both SHA and MD5 algorithms for producing the digest of a message that is ready for transmission. The compromised nodes are identified by transmitting the message in two paths; one is advertised routing path and actual routing path. The digest transmitted in both the paths must be same if the network is not affected by the compromised nodes otherwise the advertising node is suspected as compromised node. The functionality of the proposed algorithm is tested in MATLAB and is evaluated in terms of complexity of collision attack and collision resistance. The feasibility of the proposed scheme in senor nodes are checked by the simulating the same in hardware in Xilinx. KeywordsMessage Digest Algorithm, sinkhole attack, wireless sensor networks, VHDL