A Three-tier Scheme for Sybil Attack Detection in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor network (WSN) is a wireless self-organizing multi-hop network that can sense and collect the information of the monitored environment through a certain number of sensor nodes which deployed in a certain area and transmit the collected information to the client. Due to the limited power and data capacity stored by the micro sensor, it is weak in communication with other nodes, data storage and calculation, and is very vulnerable to attack and harm to the entire network. The Sybil attack is a classic example. Sybil attack refers to the attack in which malicious nodes forge multiple node identities to participate in network operation. Malicious attackers can forge multiple node identities to participate in data forwarding. So that the data obtained by the end user without any use value. In this paper, we propose a three-tier detection scheme for the Sybil node in the severe environment. Every sensor node will determine whether they are Sybil nodes through the first-level and second-level high-energy node detection. Finally, the base station determines whether the Sybil node detected by the first two stages is true Sybil node. The simulation results show that our proposed scheme significantly improves network lifetime, and effectively improves the accuracy of Sybil node detection.