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A comprehensive security analysis of LEACH++ clustering protocol for wireless sensor networks

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Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) will play a major role in future technologies in the development of the cyber-physical society. Studies show that WSNs are vulnerable to various insider attacks that may degrade its performance and affect the application services. Various intrusion detection system-based solutions have been proposed for WSNs to secure them from such attacks; however, these solutions have certain limitations with respect to completeness and evaluation. Recently, we proposed an intrusion detection framework to secure WSNs from insider attacks and proposed a protocol called LEACH++. In this paper, we perform a detailed security analysis of LEACH++ against black-hole, sink-hole and selective forwarding attacks by launching a number of attacks with different patterns. The results of our experiments performed in network simulator-2 show that the proposed scheme is highly efficient and achieves higher accuracy and detection rates with very low false-positive rate when compared to an anomaly based detection scheme.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to extend their sincere appreciation to the Deanship of Scientific Research at King Saud University, Saudi Arabia, for its funding of this research through the Research Group Project No. RGP-214.

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Correspondence to Farrukh Aslam Khan.

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Khan, F.A., Farooqi, A.H. & Derhab, A. A comprehensive security analysis of LEACH++ clustering protocol for wireless sensor networks. J Supercomput 75, 2221–2242 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-018-2680-3

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