Abstract—One of the most challenging issues in wireless sensor networks is resilience against malicious attacks. Since energy is the most precious resource for these networks, Denial of sleep attacks is recognized as one of the most serious threats. Such attacks exhaust power supply of sensor nodes and can reduce the sensor lifetime from years to days. Authentication and encryption solutions have been proposed to protect the network from denial of sleep attacks. Though, the resources constraint motivates the use of simpler solutions to the same security challenges. In this paper, we survey different types of denial of sleep attacks and we propose a cross layer energy efficient security mechanism to protect the network from these attacks. The cross layer interaction between network Mac and physical layers is mainly exploited to identify the intruders’ nodes and prevent sensor nodes from energy exhaust attacks. Simulation results indicate that our proposal is energy efficient and can significantly reduce the effect of denial of sleep attacks.

Index Terms—wireless sensor networks, cross layer security, denial of sleep attacks  

Cite: Djallel Eddine Boubiche and Azeddine Bilami, "A Defense Strategy against Energy Exhausting Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks," Journal of Emerging Technologies in Web Intelligence, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 18-27, February 2013. doi:10.4304/jetwi.5.1.18-27