Malicious node detection by a monitoring mechanism in wireless sensor networks

Inherent resource limitation nature of wireless sensor networks poses unique security challenges. Cryptography is not enough and efficient to secure wireless sensor networks; it can not prevent malicious nodes and tunneling of messages to wormholes and sinkholes. In this paper we propose a monitoring mechanism to detect malicious nodes; the proposed mechanism is protected with a secure triple key management scheme. In the proposed mechanism, message sending nodes monitors if message receiving nodes have altered the message or not transmitted the message at all by building a node suspicious table and periodically broadcasting the table to its neighbors. Once a node reaches a threshold of suspicious entries, message about the presence of that node is disseminated in the entire network warning all the nodes about the presence of a malicious node. Cluster leader then isolates that malicious node hence protecting the network from malicious attacks.