Requirements and open issues in distributed detection of node identity replicas in WSN

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are often deployed in hostile environments, where an attacker can also capture some nodes. Once a node is captured, the attacker can re-program it and start replicating the node. These replicas can then be deployed in all (or a part of) the network area. The replicas can thus perform the attack they are programmed for: DoS (Denial of Service), or influencing any voting mechanism are just examples. Detection of node replication attack is therefore a fundamental property of all the WSN applications in which an attacker presence is possible. The contribution of this paper is twofold: First, we analyze the desirable properties of a distributed mechanism for the detection of replicated IDs; second, we show that the first proposal recently appeared in literature to realize a distributed solution for the detection of replicas does not completely fulfil the requirements. Hence, the design of efficient and distributed protocols to detect node identity replicas is still an open and demanding issue.