Abstract
Virtual coordinate system (VCS) based routing provides a practical, efficient and scalable means for point-to-point routing in wireless sensor networks. Several VCS-based routing protocols have been proposed in the last few years, all assuming that nodes are cooperative. However, malicious nodes may violate this assumption, making VCS-based routing protocols vulnerable to numerous attacks. Thus, it is critical to provide security mechanisms for these protocols to ensure correct operations in adversarial deployment environments.
In this work, we study the security of VCS-based routing protocols. We identify new attacks targeting the accuracy and stability of virtual coordinates that VCS-based routing relies on and propose several defense mechanisms against the identified attacks. We evaluate the impact of the attacks and the effectiveness of our defense mechanisms using a well-known VCS-based routing protocol, BVR.
