The feasibility study of attacker localization in wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks have much vulnerability in the aspect of security because sensor nodes are limited in power, computational capabilities, and memory, and they even use a shared medium. For this reason, wireless sensor networks can be attacked easily by adversary and their attacks are mainly accomplished through channels or frequencies being used by these nodes using various attack mechanisms. Representative one of these attacks is DoS (Denial-of-Service) attack such as jamming attack, collision attack, and flooding attack. As DoS is attack which diminishes or eliminates a network's capacity, sensor nodes must be able to prevent or detect DoS attack. Mechanisms corresponding to this have been studied. No work, however, can cover these attacks because there are so many attack patterns and trade-offs between performance and accuracy. In this paper, we present a simple approach which can detect attack's location as fast as possible using CCA (Clear Channel Assessment) value. For this, we do the feasibility study for our approach through the experiment using TinyOS mica2 nodes. In addition to, we suggest new some alternatives through this study. As its result, we can speculate that the rate of false alarm is high but the detection time may be reduced in detecting attack's location.