Reinforcement Swap Attack against Directed Diffusion in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we introduce a new attack, Reinforcement Swap Attack, against Directed Diffusion based WSNs, which exploits the vulnerabilities of Directed Diffusion specifications. Its main idea is the disruption of configuration information, such as routing information to misuse route establishment along the network. Our approach is to swap Directed Diffusion reinforcement rule which means that the good route is excluded and the bad route is included. Moreover, our attack is activated and deactivated periodically to prolong its lifetime and hence brings down the target network. For the proposed attack, we present analysis, simulation, and experimental measurements. We show that the system achieves maximal damage on system performance represented by many metrics.