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  5. Ensuring the resilience of wireless sensor networks to malicious data injections through measurements inspection
 
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Ensuring the resilience of wireless sensor networks to malicious data injections through measurements inspection
File(s)
Illiano-VP-2018-PhD-Thesis.pdf (7.45 MB)
PhD Thesis
Author(s)
Illiano, Vittorio Paolo
Type
Thesis
Abstract
Malicious data injections pose a severe threat to the systems based on \emph{Wireless Sensor Networks} (WSNs) since they give the attacker control over the measurements, and on the system's status and response in turn. Malicious measurements are particularly threatening when used to spoof or mask events of interest, thus eliciting or preventing desirable responses. Spoofing and masking attacks are particularly difficult to detect since they depict plausible behaviours, especially if multiple sensors have been compromised and \emph{collude} to inject a coherent set of malicious measurements.

Previous work has tackled the problem through \emph{measurements inspection}, which analyses the inter-measurements correlations induced by the physical phenomena. However, these techniques consider simplistic attacks and are not robust to collusion. Moreover, they assume highly predictable patterns in the measurements distribution, which are invalidated by the unpredictability of events.

We design a set of techniques that effectively \emph{detect} malicious data injections in the presence of sophisticated collusion strategies, when one or more events manifest.
Moreover, we build a methodology to \emph{characterise} the likely compromised sensors.
We also design \emph{diagnosis} criteria that allow us to distinguish anomalies arising from malicious interference and faults.

In contrast with previous work, we test the robustness of our methodology with automated and sophisticated attacks, where the attacker aims to evade detection. We conclude that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, we estimate quantitatively the WSN degree of resilience and provide a methodology to give a WSN owner an assured degree of resilience by automatically designing the WSN deployment.

To deal also with the extreme scenario where the attacker has compromised most of the WSN, we propose a combination with \emph{software attestation techniques}, which are more reliable when malicious data is originated by a compromised software, but also more expensive, and achieve an excellent trade-off between cost and resilience.
Version
Open Access
Date Issued
2017-09
Date Awarded
2018-01
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/56624
DOI
https://doi.org/10.25560/56624
Copyright Statement
Attribution NoDerivatives 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-ND)
License URL
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Advisor
Lupu, Emil
Sponsor
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
Intel Collaborative Research Institute (ICRI) on Sustainable Connected Cities
Grant Number
1391446
Publisher Department
Computing
Publisher Institution
Imperial College London
Qualification Level
Doctoral
Qualification Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
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