LOW-PRICED AND ENERGY EFFICIENT DETECTION OF

REPLICAS FOR WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

ABSTRACT

The forthcoming internet of things—an intelligent collaboration of resource-limited

devices such as wireless sensor nodes that are embedded in the daily lives of users—poses new
challenges to security and end-user privacy. One of the most challenging problems is the
thwarting of replica attacks. Once a sensor node is physically captured, it can be reprogrammed
and replicated into a large number of replicas, which may maliciously occupy the network. Thus
far, various schemes have been proposed to detect replicas; however, most of them require
expensive hardware such as a global positioning system. In general, the ideal price for a sensor
node is as low as one dollar, and thus, it is equipped with limited resources; hence, it is not
practical to employ additional devices. In this paper, we propose a low-priced and efficient
solution for replica detection in static wireless sensor networks. Although the proposed solution
does not need any additional hardware, it exhibits similar or better performance, as compared to
existing schemes. Through simulation experiments, we show that the proposed solution provides
comparable performance in terms of the replica detection ratio and the time required to detect
replicas. Furthermore, we show that the proposed solution saves more energy than existing
schemes in most of our simulations.