Attacks on Sensing in Hostile Wireless Sensor-Actuator Environments

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) deployed in hostile environments are susceptible to various attacks directed at their data. In this paper, the authors focus on an emerging and largely unexplored issue arising from the presence of actuator (or actor) nodes in the form of Wireless Sensor Actuator Networks (WSANs). Specifically, they consider the case where hostile WSAN nodes belonging to a foreign network directly perturb the readings of WSN nodes during sensing. The attack is modeled as affecting the decision that a WSN node reports about the presence or absence of a phenomenon to its cluster head.