Secure Localization in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

In wireless sensor networks, location information of sensor nodes is very important. However, in a selfconfigurable wireless sensor network, the randomly deployed sensor nodes cannot know their own locations a priori. Localization methods are needed to allow sensors to determine their locations. Global position system (GPS) is a widely used localization technique, but it is not suitable for sensor nodes, since sensor nodes are low-cost and hardware-limited devices. Therefore, many studies of localization method for wireless sensor networks have been proposed. Security issues are also very important in wireless sensor networks. Yet, studies have mostly assumed that they locate sensors in a trusted environment. These methods are in fact vulnerable to malicious attacks. In this paper, we propose a secure localization scheme, which is not only able to locate sensors with high accuracy, but also to fully solve the security problem. Our scheme is robust against several known attacks, such as Wormhole attack and Sybil attack. Since sensor nodes are low-cost and hardware-limited, one of our goals is to improve the performance of the entire network by reducing the overhead of sensor nodes, such as energy and storage.