Swarm Flooding Attack against Directed Diffusion in Wireless Sensor Networks

The objective of this paper is to study the vulnerabilities of sensor networks, design, and implement new approaches for routing attack. As one of the cornerstones of network infrastructure, routing systems are facing more threats than ever; they are vulnerable by nature and challenging to protect. We present a new attack, Swarm Flooding Attack, against Directed Diffusion based WSNs, which targets the consumption of sensors computational resources, such as bandwidth, disk space, or processor time. Two variants of swarm attack have been introduced: Bee and Ant. Both approaches are inspired from the natural swarming difference between bees and ants. In all cases, the strategy used to mount an attack is the same. An attack consists of a set of malicious user queries represented by interests that are inserted into the network. However, the two forms of attack vary in the synchronization aspects among attackers. These types of attacks are hard to defend against as illustrated. For each of the proposed attack models, we present analysis, simulation, and experimental measurements. We show that the system achieves maximal damage on system performance represented by many metrics.