Towards characterizing the effectiveness of random mobility against actuation attacks

Actuation functionality in a sensor network enables an unprecedented interaction with the physical environment. When used by a malicious distributed network however, actuation may become a potent new attack. In this work we explore a new general class of actuation attacks which aim to disable the sensing fidelity and dependability of a wireless sensor network. We propose a countermeasure to this Denial of Service on Sensing (DoSS) based on a controlled level of random mobility. We show how the level of mobility may be traded-off to suit security needs and energy constraints, and to exploit a priori knowledge of the environment. We demonstrate how this random mobility approach performs under various strengths, densities and distributions of the two networks and show that it reduces the number of affected nodes exponentially over time. Furthermore we discuss how this simple mobility approach renders the network more fault-tolerant and resilient in an inherent way without a need for the nodes to communicate and aggregate their sensed data. 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.