A low-cost node capture attack algorithm for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have many micro devices that are easy to capture. In node capture attacks, the adversary physically captures sensors and extracts all information including key information from their memories, trying to compromise the system's security protection. However, the robust and random nature of many WSN security designs makes it difficult to compromise the system even with the capture of some sensors. In this paper, we approach WSN security from an adversarial point of view and investigate low-cost and efficient algorithms to identify sensors in a WSN in the shortest time with the lowest cost. Instead of randomly capturing sensors, an intelligent attacker should choose the next target based on the known topology so far. Because the identification of such has been proven to be NP-hard (non-deterministic polynomial-time hard), we propose to transform the problem into a set covering problem and develop a greedy minimum cost node capture attack algorithm (MCA) to lower cost of attack. Extensive simulations have been implemented to evaluate the performance of MCA and to compare it with several related schemes. It is shown that MCA lowers the cost of compromising WSNs by 16%. Copyright (c) 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.