Countermeasures against sybil attacks in WSN based on proofs-of-work

Abstract

It has been shown that Sybil attack -- forging identities in order to gain disproportional influence on a distributed system -- can be easily applied in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). An adversary capturing a few stations can corrupt most of classic protocols (e.g. leader election procedures) in most of considered models. Moreover, such attack is in practice undetectable in many realistic scenarios. In this paper we present an efficient countermeasure against Sybil attack. It is based on Proofs-of-Work technique -- one of the methods of preventing sending spam. In contrast to previous solutions it is based only on limited computational power of the adversarial devices. Our approach does not require any restrictions on communication between adversarial stations.