Detecting selective forwarding attacks in wireless sensor networks

Selective forwarding attacks may corrupt some mission-critical applications such as military surveillance and forest fire monitoring. In these attacks, malicious nodes behave like normal nodes in most time but selectively drop sensitive packets, such as a packet reporting the movement of the opposing forces. Such selective dropping is hard to detect. In this paper, we propose a lightweight security scheme for detecting selective forwarding attacks. The detection scheme uses a multi-hop acknowledgement technique to launch alarms by obtaining responses from intermediate nodes. This scheme is efficient and reliable in the sense that an intermediate node will report any abnormal packet loss and suspect nodes to both the base station and the source node. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that presents a detailed scheme for detecting selective forwarding attacks in the environment of sensor networks. The simulation results show that even when the channel error rate is 15%, simulating very harsh radio conditions, the detection accuracy of the proposed scheme is over 95%.