2007/10/22 by Sylvie Delaët, Delaët, Sylvie, Partha Sarathi Mandal +6
Computer Science · Engineering · #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #Data Structures and Algorithms (cs.DS) #Distributed #Energy Efficient Wireless Sensor Networks #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Indoor and Outdoor Localization Technologies #Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) #Parallel #Security in Wireless Sensor Networks #and Cluster Computing (cs.DC) #cs.CR #cs.DC #cs.DS #cs.NI
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0710.3824
arxiv created 2007/10/22 · openalex publication_date 2007/10/22 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Properly locating sensor nodes is an important building block for a large subset of wireless sensor networks (WSN) applications. As a result, the performance of the WSN degrades significantly when misbehaving nodes report false location and distance information in order to fake their actual location. In this paper we propose a general distributed deterministic protocol for accurate identification of faking sensors in a WSN. Our scheme does not rely on a subset of trusted nodes that are not allowed to misbehave and are known to every node in the network. Thus, any subset of nodes is allowed to try faking its position. As in previous approaches, our protocol is based on distance evaluation techniques developed for WSN. On the positive side, we show that when the received signal strength (RSS) technique is used, our protocol handles at most \lfloor (n)/(2) \rfloor-2 faking sensors. Also, when the time of flight (ToF) technique is used, our protocol manages at most \lfloor (n)/(2) \rfloor - 3 misbehaving sensors. On the negative side, we prove that no deterministic protocol can identify faking sensors if their number is \lceil (n)/(2)\rceil -1. Thus our scheme is almost optimal with respect to the number of faking sensors. We discuss application of our technique in the trusted sensor model. More precisely our results can be used to minimize the number of trusted sensors that are needed to defeat faking ones.