A lightweight intrusion detection system based on RSSI for sybil attack detection in wireless sensor networks

As the prevalence of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) grows in the many mission-critical applications such as military and civil domains, the need for network security has become a critical concern. The inherently vulnerable characteristics of WSNs appoint them susceptible to various types of attacks. A particularly harmful attack against sensor and ad hoc networks is known as the Sybil attack, where a node illegitimately claims multiple identities. Sybil attacks can severely deteriorate the network performance and compromise the security by disrupting many networking protocols. This paper presents a lightweight Intrusion detection system (IDS) based on received signal strength indicator (RSSI) readings of messages to protect WSNs against Sybil attack. Our idea in the proposed method is based on the local calculation (within each node and without the need for communications) the RSSI ratio from the suspected nodes to the Sybil attack. The obtained results demonstrate that Proposed System achieves high detection accuracy, low false alarm rate and low energy consumption appointing it a promising IDS candidate for wireless sensor networks.