Providing Security to Wireless Sensor Networks by Identifying and Preventing Malicious Node

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks consist of set of nodes which are randomly deployed in a region. Wireless Networks are infrastructure-less networks, hence there is a possibility for the malicious node to retrieve the information of data packets.  Now a days in wireless sensor networks there may occur most vulnerable attacks such as sinkhole attack and the wormhole attack, etc. Both these attacks may cause the problem of network failure and it makes the sensor node unable to communicate. The Wormhole attack is particularly challenging to deal with since the adversary does not need to compromise any nodes. This paper introduces an easy and effective method to detect and prevent these attacks. The malicious node gives the alternate path for the source node and the forwarded packets will not reach the correct destination. In order to provide the secure way communication in wireless sensor networks our proposed algorithm is a routing algorithm. In this paper, we present a secure routing algorithm against these attacks based on mobile agents designed for mobile wireless sensor networks (MWSN) and show how it can be configured to avoid these attacks. Agent updates the information dynamically. In order to reduce the overhead, our algorithm maintains a counter to protect from the attack. The performance is enhanced for selected metrics and implemented in Network Simulator (Ns2).