A Secure Group-Based Blackhole Node Detection Scheme for Hierarchical Wireless Sensor Networks

Rapid development of the wireless communication technology and low cost of sensing devices has accelerated the development of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). These types of networks have a wide range of applications including habitat monitoring, health monitoring, data acquisition in hazardous environmental conditions and military operations. Sensor nodes are resource constrained having limited communication range, battery and processing power. Sensor nodes are prone to failure and can be also physically captured by an adversary. One of the main concerns in WSNs is to provide security, especially in the cases where they are deployed for military applications and monitoring. Further, WSNs are prone to various attacks such as wormhole, sinkhole and blackhole attacks. A blackhole attack is a kind of denial of service attack, which is very difficult to detect and defend and such blackhole attack, if happens, affects the entire performance of the network. In addition, it causes high end-to-end delay and less throughput with less packet delivery ratio. The situation can be worst if multiple blackhole attacker nodes present in the network. As a result, detection and prevention of the blackhole attack becomes crucial in WSNs. In this paper, we aim to propose a new efficient group-based technique for the detection and prevention of multiple blackhole attacker nodes in WSNs. In our approach, the entire WSN is divided into several clusters and each cluster has a powerful high-end sensor node (called a cluster head), which is responsible for the detection of blackhole attacker nodes, if present, in that cluster. The proposed scheme achieves about 90 % detection rate and 3.75 % false positive rate, which are significantly better than the existing related schemes. Furthermore, our scheme is efficient and thus, it is very appropriate for practical applications in WSNs.