BAMBi: Blackhole attacks mitigation with multiple base stations in wireless sensor networks

Black hole attacks occur when an adversary captures and re-programs a set of nodes in the network to block/drop the packets they receive/generate instead of forwarding them towards the base station. As a result any information that enters the black hole region is captured. Black hole attacks are easy to constitute, and they are capable of undermining network effectiveness by partitioning the network, such that important event information do not reach the base stations. Several techniques based on secret sharing and multipath routing have been proposed in the literature to overcome black hole attacks in the network. However, these techniques are not very effective, and as we demonstrate in this paper, they may even end up making black hole attacks more effective. We propose an efficient technique that uses multiple base stations deployed in the network to counter the impact of black holes on data transmission. Our simulation results demonstrate that our technique can achieve more than 99% packet delivery success. We prove that our scheme can identify 100% of the black hole nodes and demonstrate by simulation results that the technique suffers from very little false positives.