A Lightweight Intrusion Detection System Based on Specifications to Improve Security in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Due to the prevalence of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in the many mission-critical applications such as military areas, security has been considered as one of the essential parameters in Quality of Service (QoS), and Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is considered as a fundamental requirement for security in these networks. This paper presents a lightweight Intrusion Detection System to protect the WSNs against the most important of routing attacks in network layer based on their extracted specifications. The proposed IDS, in contrast to related works that often focuses on a specific attack, covers almost all recognized important routing attacks in WSNs. With the full simulation of the routing attacks and the careful examination of their behavior, we extracted key specifications to identify them in the proposed system. Also, due to local operations provided to detect and significantly reduce communications, the proposed method is a lightweight approach. Another advantage of the proposed method is reducing false alarms rate by applying appropriate thresholds. We considered all performance criteria to evaluate and compare the proposed method. Simulation results show that the proposed system is an effective and lightweight IDS in WSNs due to high detection accuracy, low false alarms rate, and low power consumption.