Active response mechanism against dynamic propagation attacks in distributed sensor networks

Addressing the extremely threatening dynamic propagation attacks (DPAs) in the network environment, the active response mechanism to combat self-propagation attacks with high concealment is investigated in this paper. Based on mobile sink nodes (MSNs) with both moving and sniffing capabilities, the problem of self-propagation attack detection is transformed into the problem of tracking attackers by MSNs, and the active response mechanism for DPA based on detection domain is proposed. Based on this mechanism, the MSN can trigger different actions according to whether the attacker is monitorable. In particular, for the unmonitorable attack that cannot be completely observed, an attack detection algorithm based on partial confidence space is proposed. Theoretical analysis shows that when specific conditions are satisfied, the proposed algorithm can effectively help the MSN achieve targeted tracking of the unmonitorable attack. Simulation results in different scenarios verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.