Author Archives: Vittorio Illiano

Detecting Malicious Data Injections in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have become popular for monitoring critical infrastructures, military applications, and Internet of Things (IoT) applications.

However, WSNs carry several vulnerabilities in the sensor nodes, the wireless medium, and the environment. In particular, the nodes are vulnerable to tampering on the field, since they are often unattended, physically accessible, and use of tamper-resistant hardware is often too expensive.

Malicious data injections consist of manipulations of the measurements-related data, which threaten the WSN’s mission since they enable an attacker to solicit a wrong system’s response, such as concealing the presence of problems, or raising false alarms.

Measurements inspection is a method for counteracting malicious measurements by exploiting internal correlations in the measurements themselves. Since it does not need extra data it is a lightweight approach, and since it makes no assumption on the attack vector it is caters for several attacks at once.

Our first achievement was to identify the benefits and shortcomings of the current measurements inspection techniques and produce a literature survey, which was published in ACM Computing Surveys: V. P. Illiano and E. C. Lupu. ”Detecting malicious data injections in wireless sensor networks: A survey”, Oct. 2015 . The survey has revealed a large number of algorithms proposed for measurements inspection in sensor measurements. However, malicious data injections are usually tackled together with faulty measurements. Nevertheless, malicious measurements are, by and large, more difficult to detect than faulty measurements, especially when multiple malicious sensors collude and produce measurements that are consistent with each other.

We have designed an initial algorithm, which detects effectively malicious data injections in the presence of sophisticated collusion strategies among a subset of sensor nodes when a single event of interest (e.g. fire, earthquake, power outage) occurs at a time. The detection algorithm selects only information that appears reliable. Colluding sensors are not allowed to compensate for each other in the detection metric whilst still injecting malicious data thanks to an aggregation operator that is accurate in the presence of genuine measurements as well as resistant to malicious data. This work was published in IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, V. Illiano and E. Lupu, Detecting malicious data injections in event detection wireless sensor networks, Sept 2015

When multiple events manifest, more complex attack strategies are possible, such as creating false events near legitimate ones, transforming a severe event into several mild events etc. We have then reviewed and re-developed the initial approach to cope with such complex scenarios. Furthermore, we have dealt with the problem of characterisation, i.e. identification of the compromised sensors, and diagnosis, i.e. inferring when the anomaly is most likely malicious or faulty. This work has been published in IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, V. P. Illiano, L. Munoz-Gonzalez, and E. Lupu, Don t fool me!: Detection, characterisation and diagnosis of spoofed and masked events in wireless sensor networks, 2016

Whilst detection proved highly reliable also in the presence of several colluding nodes, we have witnessed that more genuine nodes are needed to make a correct characterisation of malicious nodes. Hence, we have studied techniques to increase the reliability in identifying malicious nodes through occasional recourse to Software Attestation, a technique that is particularly reliable in detecting compromised software, but is also expensive for the limited computation and energy resources of the sensor nodes. Based on a thorough analysis of the aspects that make measurements inspection and software attestation complementary, we have designed the methods that allow to achieve a reliability as high as for attestation with an overhead as low as for measurements inspection.
This work will appear in the 10th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks (WiSec 2017).

More recently, we are working on the evaluation of the technique against evasion, i.e. an attacker that maximises the chance to stay undetected whilst causing damage.

Don’ t fool me!: Detection, Characterisation and Diagnosis of Spoofed and Masked Events in Wireless Sensor Networks

dont-foolme-pic
Wireless Sensor Networks carry a high risk of being compromised, as their deployments are often unattended, physically accessible and the wireless medium is difficult to secure. Malicious data injections take place when the sensed measurements are maliciously altered to trigger wrong and potentially dangerous responses. When many sensors are compromised, they can collude with each other to alter the measurements making such changes difficult to detect. Distinguishing between genuine and malicious measurements is even more difficult when significant variations may be introduced because of events, especially if more events occur simultaneously. We propose a novel methodology based on wavelet transform to detect malicious data injections, to characterise the responsible sensors, and to distinguish malicious interference from faulty behaviours. The results, both with simulated and real measurements, show that our approach is able to counteract sophisticated attacks, achieving a significant improvement over state-of-the-art approaches.

 

Vittorio P. Illiano, Luis Muñoz-González and Emil C. Lupu: Don’ t fool me!: Detection, Characterisation and Diagnosis of Spoofed and Masked Events in Wireless Sensor Networks.

To appear in IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing
IEEE TNSM link (open access)

Detecting Malicious Data Injections in Wireless Sensor Networks: a Survey

Wireless Sensor Networks are widely advocated to monitor environmental parameters, structural integrity of the built environment and use of urban spaces, services and utilities. However, embedded sensors are vulnerable to compromise by external actors through malware but also through their wireless and physical interfaces. Compromised sensors can be made to report false measurements with the aim to produce inap- propriate and potentially dangerous responses. Such malicious data injections can be particularly difficult to detect if multiple sensors have been compromised as they could emulate plausible sensor behaviour such as failures or detection of events where none occur. This survey reviews the related work on malicious data injection in wireless sensor networks, derives general principles and a classification of approaches within this domain, compares related studies and identifies areas that require further investigation.

Vittorio P. Illiano and Emil C. Lupu: Detecting Malicious Data Injections in Wireless Sensor Networks: a Survey Published in ACM Computing Surveys Vol. 48, No. 2, Article 24, Publication date: October 2015
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Manuscript published on ACM Computing Surveys

Detecting Malicious Data Injections In Event Detection Wireless Sensor Networks

ltsa-pca-picWireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are vulnerable and can be maliciously compromised, either physically or remotely, with potentially devastating effects. When sensor networks are used to detect the occurrence of events such as fires, intruders or heart-attacks, malicious data can be injected to create fake events and, thus, trigger an undesired response, or to mask the occurrence of actual events. We propose a novel algorithm to identify malicious data injections and build measurement estimates that are resistant to several compromised sensors even when they collude in the attack. We also propose a methodology to apply this algorithm in different application contexts and evaluate its results on three different datasets drawn from distinct WSN deployments. This leads us to identify different trade-offs in the design of such algorithms and how they are influenced by the application context.

Vittorio P. Illiano and Emil C. Lupu: Detecting Malicious Data Injections In Event Detection Wireless Sensor Networks. To appear in IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management
IEEE publication link
Open access link