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Handling the Evil Ring Attack on Localization and Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks
Wei Shi, Michel Barbeau, Joaquin Garcia-Alfaro and Jean-Pierre Corriveau

Compass, face and geographical routing, for ad hoc and wireless sensor networks, rely on nodes knowing their geographic location and locations of other nodes. For location-unaware nodes without self-positioning devices (e.g., GPS), Garcia-Alfaro et al. proposed location determination algorithms leveraging location reports from neighbors.

The evil ring is an attack on the location determination algorithms of Garcia-Alfaro et al. When inquired, an attacker returns a fake location sitting on a circle centered at the victim’s location and with radius equal to the attacker-victim separation distance. The calculation of the distance between the victim and the attacker is not affected. A location unaware node correctly determines its location. The attack, however, misleads such as node in getting and using wrong locations for its malicious neighbors.

We introduce and analyze an evil ring attack detection algorithm. Location-unaware nodes cross-check the consistency of the information collected from neighbors. Neighbors perpetrating the evil ring attack are uncovered. O(n) messages are sufficient to localize all location-unaware nodes, to detect all liars, and to construct valid neighbor tables.

Simulation results demonstrate that our algorithm, named Cross- Check, outperforms the Garcia-Alfaro et al. algorithm Majority-Three Neighbor Signals. We compared the percentage of location-unaware nodes that successfully derive valid neighbor tables. Simulations were conducted under equivalent topology conditions, varying the percentage of evil ring attack perpetrators.

Keywords: Ad hoc network; wireless sensor network; Liar detection; localization; algorithms; compass routing; face routing; geographical routing

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