Sybil Node Detection in Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks Using Observer Nodes

Abstract

Sybil attack is one of the well-known dangerous attacks against wireless sensor networks in which a malicious node attempts to propagate several fabricated identities. This attack significantly affects routing protocols and many network operations, including voting and data aggregation. The mobility of nodes in mobile wireless sensor networks makes it problematic to employ proposed Sybil node detection algorithms in static wireless sensor networks, including node positioning, RSSI-based, and neighbour cooperative algorithms. This paper proposes a dynamic, light-weight, and efficient algorithm to detect Sybil nodes in mobile wireless sensor networks. In the proposed algorithm, observer nodes exploit neighbouring information during different time periods to detect Sybil nodes. The proposed algorithm is implemented by J-SIM simulator and its performance is compared with other existing algorithm by conducting a set of experiments. Simulation results indicate that the proposed algorithm outperforms other existing methods regarding detection rate and false detection rate. Moreover, they also showed that the mean detection rate and false detection rate of the proposed algorithm are respectively 99% and less than 2%.