Lightweight Secure Localization Approach in Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper is concerned with the security problem of Time of Arrival (ToA) based localization schemes in a wireless sensor network (WSN) with multiple attackers and this paper focuses on defending against external attacks, especially under cooperative external attackers. The prior scheme for defending against the attacks in the localization scheme often introduce high communication overhead and their security relies on the capability of the attackers. In this paper, we propose a lightweight secure ToA-based localization scheme in a WSN by exploiting the noise feature caused by external distance attacks. In comparison with the prior scheme, our scheme provides lower communication overhead and a higher level of security. We theoretically analyze the performance of the proposed scheme over fading channels and derive the closed-form expressions. We implemented our scheme and conducted extensive performance comparisons through simulations. Our experimental results show that the closed-form expressions for the detection performance perfectly match with their simulation results as we expected. The communication overhead of the proposed scheme is saved by 72.8% than that of the prior scheme for different numbers of anchors and is independent of the times of measurements.