Swarm intelligence based approach for sinkhole attack detection in wireless sensor networks

•An Ant Colony Optimization Attack Detection algorithm is proposed to identify the sinkhole attacks.•A voting method is proposed to identify the intruder.•An ABXES algorithm is proposed to distribute the keys to the alerted nodes.•The alerted nodes use the keys to sign the suspect list to agree on the intruder.•It is shown that the proposed method scales well in comparison to LIDeA architecture for sinkhole attack detection.

Swarm intelligence, a nature inspired computing applies an algorithm situated within the context of agent based models that mimics the behavior of ants to detect sinkhole attacks in wireless sensor networks. An Ant Colony Optimization Attack Detection (ACO-AD) algorithm is proposed to identify the sinkhole attacks based on the nodeids defined in the ruleset. The nodes generating an alert on identifying a sinkhole attack are grouped together. A voting method is proposed to identify the intruder. An Ant Colony Optimization Boolean Expression Evolver Sign Generation (ABXES) algorithm is proposed to distribute the keys to the alerted nodes in the group for signing the suspect list to agree on the intruder. It is shown that the proposed method identifies the anomalous connections without generating false positives and minimizes the storage in the sensor nodes in comparison to LIDeA architecture for sinkhole attack detection. Experimental results demonstrating the Ant Colony Optimization approach of detecting a sinkhole attack are presented.

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