Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications range from domestic
Internet of Things systems like temperature monitoring of homes
to the monitoring and control of large-scale critical infrastructures.
The greatest risk with the use of WSNs in critical infrastructure is
their vulnerability to malicious network level attacks. Their radio
communication network can be disrupted, causing them to lose or
delay data which will compromise system functionality. This paper
presents Antilizer, a lightweight, fully-distributed solution to enable
WSNs to detect and recover from common network level attack
scenarios. In Antilizer each sensor node builds a self-referenced
trust model of its neighbourhood using network overhearing. The
node uses the trust model to autonomously adapt its communica-
tion decisions. In the case of a network attack, a node can make
neighbour collaboration routing decisions to avoid affected regions
of the network. Mobile agents further bound the damage caused by
attacks. These agents enable a simple notification scheme which
propagates collaborative decisions from the nodes to the base sta-
tion. A filtering mechanism at the base station further validates
the authenticity of the information shared by mobile agents. We
evaluate Antilizer in simulation against several routing attacks. Our
results show that Antilizer reduces data loss down to 1% (4% on
average), with operational overheads of less than 1% and provides
fast network-wide convergence.