A statistical approach to detect jamming attacks in wireless sensor networks

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Authors

Osanaiye, Opeyemi
Alfa, Attahiru Sule
Hancke, Gerhard P.

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Publisher

MDPI Publishing

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), in recent times, have become one of the most promising network solutions with a wide variety of applications in the areas of agriculture, environment, healthcare and the military. Notwithstanding these promising applications, sensor nodes in WSNs are vulnerable to different security attacks due to their deployment in hostile and unattended areas and their resource constraints. One of such attacks is the DoS jamming attack that interferes and disrupts the normal functions of sensor nodes in a WSN by emitting radio frequency signals to jam legitimate signals to cause a denial of service. In this work we propose a step-wise approach using a statistical process control technique to detect these attacks. We deploy an exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) to detect anomalous changes in the intensity of a jamming attack event by using the packet inter-arrival feature of the received packets from the sensor nodes. Results obtained from a trace-driven simulation show that the proposed solution can efficiently and accurately detect jamming attacks in WSNs with little or no overhead.

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Keywords

Jamming attack, Inter-arrival time, Wireless sensor network (WSN), Exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA), Sensor nodes, Trace driven simulation, Statistical approach, Resource constraint, Radiofrequency signals, Statistical process control, Military applications, Denial-of-service attack

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Citation

Osanaiye, O., Alfa, A.S. & Hancke, G.P. 2018, 'A statistical approach to detect jamming attacks in wireless sensor networks', Sensors, vol. 18, art. 1691, pp. 1-15.