Forensic Analysis Of Blackhole Attack in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

In recent years, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) has been exponentially proliferated in almost every domain of life encompassing civil and military sectors. In fact, due to the flexible implementation nature, WSN has become one of the richest domains of Information technology echo-system.These sensor networks can be implemented in challenging and unusual terrains and environments, in which human reachability or sustainability is difficult or even impossible. The wireless broadcasting and resource-constrained environments along-with limited transmission range make WSN prone to various types of cyberattacks such as DDoS, Sybil, Sinkhole, blackhole, and wormhole attacks.An exertive research effort has been devoted to secure WSN, but security is never ultimate. Instead of the state of the art detection and preventing techniques, cyberattacks still occur. It is the need of the hour to forensically investigate and analyze the cybercrimes in sensor networks. The Critical Infrastructures which are heavily dependent upon WSN required to be analyzed after failure and the facts behind the failure need to be unraveled. Specifically, in case of mobility, it is challenging to sustain and maintain the availability, confidentiality and integrity of the network. We examined the performance of the network with the AODV routing protocol under the iv Blackhole attack using the Friis propagation loss model on the network simulator (NS3). We briefly examined the traffic in the network and on the nodes by different tools to asses the damage of the attack on the network.