Autonomous and distributed node recovery in wireless sensor networks

Intrusion or misbehaviour detection systems are an important and widely accepted security tool in computer and wireless sensor networks. Their aim is to detect misbehaving or faulty nodes in order to take appropriate countermeasures, thus limiting the damage caused by adversaries as well as by hard or software faults. So far, however, once detected, misbehaving nodes have just been isolated from the rest of the sensor network and hence are no longer usable by running applications. In the presence of an adversary or software faults, this proceeding will inevitably lead to an early and complete loss of the whole network. For this reason, we propose to no longer expel misbehaving nodes, but to recover them into normal operation. In this paper, we address this problem and present a formal specification of what is considered a secure and correct node recovery algorithm together with a distributed algorithm that meets these properties. We discuss its requirements on the soft- and hardware ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: SASN
• Authors: Mario Strasser, Harald Vogt
• Keywords: SASN 2006, Sensor Networks, Software Faults, Wireless Sensor Networks