Using overhearing technique to detect malicious packet-modifying attacks in wireless sensor networks

Recently, security issues in wireless sensor networks become more important. Many mechanisms have been proposed for solving varying types of malicious attacks. However, few of them discussed malicious packet-modifying attacks (MPA). The MPA come from some malicious nodes that modify contents of data packets while relaying. Once MPA occur, the sink node may make wrong decisions according to the incorrect packets. In this paper, an overhearing-based detection mechanism (OBD) is presented for detecting the occurrence of MPA. Both OBD and a traditional two-path detection mechanism were successfully implemented for comparison using the NS2. The simulation measured the metrics in successful detection rate, end-to-end delay, power consumption, and detection latency. Compared to the two-path detection mechanism, the overhearing-based mechanism not only incurred less overhead but provided more accurate failure detection performance.