TrustMIX: Trustworthy MIX for Energy Saving in Sensor Networks

TL;DR

This paper enhances the MIX sensor scheme with trust management to improve energy efficiency and defend against sinkhole attacks, demonstrating that trust mechanisms significantly mitigate attack impacts while maintaining network longevity.

Contribution

It introduces a trust-based variant of MIX that effectively counters sinkhole attacks without sacrificing energy efficiency.

Findings

MIX is vulnerable to sinkhole attacks.

Trust management reduces attack impact.

Network lifetime is preserved with trust mechanisms.

Abstract

MIX has recently been proposed as a new sensor scheme with better energy management for data-gathering in Wireless Sensor Networks. However, it is not known how it performs when some of the sensors carry out sinkhole attacks. In this paper, we propose a variant of MIX with adjunct computational trust management to limit the impact of such sinkhole attacks. We evaluate how MIX resists sinkhole attacks with and without computational trust management. The main result of this paper is to find that MIX is very vulnerable to sinkhole attacks but that the adjunct trust management efficiently reduces the impact of such attacks while preserving the main feature of MIX: increased lifetime of the network.