Malicious replica quarantining protocol for Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks using replica detection and identification

Since sensor networks are deployed in harsh and unattended environments, and the nodes are not tamper-resistant, security is crucial for all the impending sensor network applications. When physically compromised, confidential credential of sensor nodes may be revealed to adversaries. Upon obtaining the credentials, an adversary can produce a number of replicas of a compromised legitimate node. These replicas interfere with or prevent the normal operation of the network through attacks called replica or imposter attacks. Hence detection, identification and quarantining of replicas attacks are crucial. Existing schemes mostly focus on static sensor networks while solutions for MWSN's are also available. Upon discovering that an id is used by multiple nodes, these schemes quarantine all nodes with the same id without distinguishing the legitimate node from its replicas. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed light-weight and memory efficient signature-based protocol for quarantining malicious replicas in the presence of Byzantine replicas in MWSN's. This protocol quarantines only the replicas that present wrong sensed data in the presence of Byzantine replicas that modify and communicate its data and send false claims. The proposed protocol uses a signature generation, exchange and verification scheme to detect, uniquely identify and distinguish replicas with the same id among multiple replicas for a single legitimate node. The protocol quarantines only the malicious replicas that present wrong sensed data among all the detected replicas of each legitimate node by uniquely identifying the malicious replicas using their unique signatures.