Are You Really Charging Me?

Abstract

Wireless rechargeable sensor networks (WRSNs), which benefit from recent breakthroughs in Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) technology, emerge as very promising for network lifetime extension. Traditional methods concentrate on system performance improvement while little attention has been paid to security, making them vulnerable to novel attacks. In this paper, we develop a novel Charging Spoofing Attack (CSA), in which a mobile charger (MC) is charging a node intuitively. Nevertheless, it is launching an attack based on the nonlinear superposition principle of electromagnetic waves, causing the target node to be unable to receive any energy and finally exhausted in vain. First, we explain and model the nonlinear superposition effect through experiments, which points out the potential of launching such a novel attack. Second, we formalize the attacking problem as a charging uTility optImization problem with key noDe timE window constraints (TIDE). Then, we propose an approximation algorithm termed CSA to solve the TIDE problem with a bounded performance guarantee. Theoretical analyses are presented to exploit the feature of CSA. Finally, to demonstrate the outperformed features of our scheme, extensive simulations and test-bed experiments are conducted, revealing that CSA can exhaust at least 80% of key nodes without being detected.