Fuzzy-Based Adaptive Countering Method against False Endorsement Insertion Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are vulnerable to false endorsement insertion attacks (FEIAs), where a malicious adversary intentionally inserts incorrect endorsements into legitimate sensing reports in order to block notifications of real events. A centralized solution can detect and adaptively counter FEIAs while conserving the energy of the forwarding nodes because it does not make the nodes verify reports using cryptographic operations. However, to apply this solution to a WSN, the users must carefully select 10 or more security parameters, which are used to determine the occurrences of FEIAs. Thus, an inappropriate choice of a single parameter might result in the misinterpretation of or misdetection of FEIAs. Therefore, the present study proposes a fuzzy-based centralized method for detecting and adaptively countering FEIAs in dense WSNs, where two fuzzy rule-based systems are used to detect an FEIA and to select the most effective countermeasure against the FEIA. A major benefit of the proposed method is that the fuzzy systems can be optimized automatically by combining a genetic algorithm and a simulation. Thus, users only need to write a model of the WSN to apply the proposed method to a WSN. The improved performance with this method is demonstrated by simulation results.