Clone Attack Detection Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a collection of autonomous sensor nodes which are low cost hardware components consists of sensor nodes with constraints on battery life, memory size and computation capabilities to monitor physical (or) environmental conditions. WSN is deployed in unattended and unsecure environments, so it is vulnerable to various types of attacks. One of the physical attacks is node replication attack (or) clone attack. An adversary can easily capture one node from the network and extract information from captured node. Then reprogram it to create a clone of a captured node. Then these clones can be deployed in all network areas, they can be considered as legitimate members of the network, so it is difficult to detect a replicated node. WSN can be either static (or) mobile, in that centralized and distributed clone attack detection methods are available. In this paper we analysis various centralized and distributed protocols in the static and mobile environments. We review these protocols and compare their performance with the help of witness selection, communication and memory overhead, detection probability of replicated nodes, resilience against adversary’s node compromise.