Lightweight energy consumption based intrusion detection system for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks are increasingly used in industrial settings and in safety-critical applications, generating a financial and social impact. Complementing to cryptographic means to protect the communication, it is desirable to monitor the performance of the system and detect attackers during operation. However, existing intrusion detection systems are too resource-demanding. In this paper, we propose a lightweight, energy-efficient system which makes use of mobile agents to detect intrusions based on the energy consumption of the sensor nodes as a metric. A linear regression model is applied to predict the energy consumption. Simulation results indicate that denial-of-service attacks such as flooding can be detected with high accuracy, while keeping the number of false positives very low.