4. Clone Detection

The previous chapter considered the node capture problem. The capture of a node affects all the network: All the nodes should be aware that the corresponding node’s ID is untrusted from the moment of the capture. We proposed a new approach for the node capture detection. However, the capture detection comes with a cost (in terms of energy consumption) that is inversely proportional to the detection time and should not be prohibitive for the network. As a result, the detection time cannot be decreased under a given threshold. If the node capture is undetected, the adversary can first re-program the captured node and then clone it in a large number of clones, easily taking over the network. Then, the detection of node clone attacks in a wireless sensor network is also a fundamental problem. A few distributed solutions to this problem have been recently proposed in literature. However, these solutions are not satisfactory. First, they are energy and memory demanding: A serious drawback for any protocol to be used in a resource constrained environment like a sensor network. Further, they are vulnerable to specific adversary models introduced in this chapter.