Active Eavesdroppers Detection System in Multi-hop Wireless Sensor Networks

Eavesdropping attacks can threaten the privacy, confidentiality, and authenticity of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Since the broadcast nature of the wireless channel is vulnerable to overhearing by adversaries, detection of the presence of eavesdroppers in wireless networks can mitigate the impacts of more harmful attacks. Traditionally, researchers have tried to decrease the risk of covert eavesdropping by cryptographic protocols, information-theoretic solutions, or controlling transmission range. These approaches are not suitable for the resource-limited WSNs. In this paper, we propose a novel Active Eavesdroppers Detection (AED) system for multi-hop WSNs. Our proposed system utilizes an out-of-band Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-assisted monitoring system in WSNs to measure intranode delays. In addition, the detection system is equipped with a lightweight detection engine, which runs at edge devices, using the Z-test algorithm. We show the effectiveness of our proposed system through simulations. The results show a high detection rate and a low false-positive rate.