Securing location discovery in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Providing security for wireless sensor networks in hostile environments has a significant importance. Resilience against malicious attacks during the process of location discovery has an increasing need. There are many applications that rely on sensor nodes\u27 locations to be accurate in order to function correctly. The need to provide secure, attack resistant location discovery schemes has become a challenging research topic. In this thesis, location discovery techniques are discussed and the security threats and attacks are explained. I also present current secure location discovery schemes which are developed for range-based location discovery. The thesis goal is to develop a secure range-free location discovery scheme. This is accomplished by enhancing the voting-based scheme developed in [8, 9] to be used as the bases for developing a secure range-free location discovery scheme. Both the enhancement voting-based and the secure range-free schemes are implemented on Sun SPOT wireless sensors and subjected to various levels of location discovery attacks and tested under different sensor network scales using a simulation program developed for testing purposes