Understanding the Performance of Software Defined Wireless Sensor Networks Under Denial of Service Attack

Gustavo A Nunez (1) , Cintia Borges (1) , Arsenia Chorti (2)

1 Escola Politecnica da Universidade de Sao Paulo [Sao Paulo]
2 ETIS - UMR 8051 - Equipes Traitement de l'Information et Systèmes

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are formed from restricted devices and are known to be vulnerable to denial of service (DoS) security attacks. In parallel, software-defined networking has been identified as a solution for many WSN challenges with respect to flexibility and reuse. Conversely, the SDN control plane centralization may bring about new security threats and vulnerabilities. In this work, we perform a traffic analysis of software-defined WSN (SDWSN) in order to gain understanding of the network's performance when it is under certain types of DoS attacks. In particular, we consider three different DoS scenarios of increasing aggressiveness: (i) false flow requests DoS, (ii) false data flow forwarding DoS, and, (iii) false neighbor information passing DoS. Our simulation results for the latter two types of attack showed significant changes both in the average value and the variance of the delivery rate and the overall overhead. These results demonstrate that it is possible to identify when a SDWSN is under a particular type of DoS, by monitoring the respective quantities.

Domaines: Informatique et théorie des jeux [cs.GT]; Cryptographie et sécurité [cs.CR]; Sciences de l'ingénieur [physics]; Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]

Gustavo A Nunez, Cintia Borges, Arsenia Chorti. Understanding the Performance of Software Defined Wireless Sensor Networks Under Denial of Service Attack. Open Journal of Internet of Things, 2019, 5 (1). ⟨hal-02882103⟩