Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
Byzantine overlay network wormhole attack: This type of attack is a variant of
wormhole attack, and occurs when the wormhole attack is extended to multiple
sensor nodes; resulting in an overlay of compromised nodes. It provides a false
illusion, to honest nodes, that they are surrounded by legitimate nodes, resulting
in frequent reuse of the adversarial path.
2.2.2.6 Sybil Attack
The sybil attack was first introduced by Douceur while studying security in peer-to-
peer networks (Douceur 2002), and later Karlof and Wagner showed that this type
of attack poses a serious threat to routing mechanisms in WSN (Karlof and Wagner
2003). Sybil is an impersonation attack in which a malicious node masquerades as a
set of nodes by claiming false identities, or generating new identities in the worst case
(Newsome et al. 2004). Such attacks can be easily executed in a WSN environment
because the nodes are invariably deployed in an unstructured and distributed envi-
ronment, and communicate via radio transmission. They are especially detrimental
in applications such as data aggregation, voting systems, reputation evaluation, and
geographic routing. Using a sybil attack in location-aware routing, it is possible to be in
multiple locations at the same time.
2.2.2.7 Sinkhole Attack
In a sinkhole attack, the adversary impersonates a sink node and attracts the whole
of traffic to a node or a set of nodes. Similar to a blackhole attack, the attacker takes
control of a few compromised nodes and advertises false routing information to its
neighbors, thereby luring all traffic to him.
2.2.3 Threats to Availability
2.2.3.1 Denial of Service (DoS) or DDoS
A denial-of-service attack occurs when an attacker floods the victim with bogus
or spoofed packets with the intent to lower the response rate of the victim. In the
worst-case scenario, it makes the victim totally unresponsive. For instance, in a WSN
environment where nodes have limited computational capacity, a DoS attack from a
resource-abundant adversary can overwhelm the nodes by flooding packets, which
will exhaust communication bandwidth, memory, and processing power. From an
attacker's point of view, this attack is also useful in wireless networks where nodes are
required to deliver time-critical data. Jamming (discussed in the next section) the wire-
less links can also lead to a DoS attack.
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