Title
On the Vulnerabilities of the Virtual Force Approach to Mobile Sensor Deployment.
Abstract
The virtual force approach is at the basis of many solutions proposed for deploying mobile sensors. In this paper we study the vulnerabilities of this approach. We show that by compromising a few mobile sensors, an attacker can influence the movement of other sensors and prevent the achievement of the network coverage goals. We introduce an attack, called opportunistic movement, and give an analytical study of its efficacy. We show that in a typical scenario this attack can reduce coverage by more than 50 percent, by only compromising a 7 percent of the nodes. We propose two algorithms to counteract the above mentioned attack, DRM and SecureVF. DRM is a light-weight algorithm which randomly repositions sensors from overcrowded areas. SecureVF requires a more complex coordination among sensors but, unlike DRM, it enables detection and identification of malicious sensors. We investigate the performance of DRM and SecureVF through simulations. We show that DRM can significantly reduce the effects of the attack, at the expense of an increase in the energy consumption due to additional movements. By contrast, SecureVF completely neutralizes the attack and allows the achievement of the coverage goals of the network even in the presence of localization inaccuracies.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1109/TMC.2014.2308209
Mobile Computing, IEEE Transactions  
Keywords
Field
DocType
Force,Radio frequency,Mobile computing,Analytical models,Mobile communication,Bills of materials,Security
Mobile computing,Software deployment,Computer science,Computer network,Energy consumption,Mobile telephony,Vulnerability,Distributed computing
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
13
11
1536-1233
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
9
0.47
20
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Novella Bartolini125021.87
Gian Carlo Bongiovanni29312.59
Thomas F. La Porta390.47
S. Silvestri427529.61