Abstract
Localization of sensor nodes is very important for many applications proposed for wireless sensor networks (WSN), such as environment monitoring, geographical routing, and target tracking. Because sensor networks may be deployed in hostile environments, localization approaches can be compromised by many malicious attacks. The adversaries can broadcast corrupted location information; they can jam or modify the transmitting signals between sensors to mislead them to obtain incorrect distance measurements or nonexistent connectivity links. All these malicious attacks will cause sensors not able to or wrongly estimate their locations. In this chapter, we summarize the threat models and provide a comprehensive survey and taxonomy of existing secure localization and verification schemes for wireless sensor networks.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Wireless Sensor Network (WSN): A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a wireless network consisting of autonomous devices that cooperatively monitor environmental conditions, such as temperature, sound, pollutants, and so forth.
Wormholes: Wormholes in wireless sensor networks are nonexisting communication tunnels (usually wired links) created by adversaries. The messages received at one end of a wormhole can be transmitted through the tunnel, and broadcasted at the other end.
Secure Localization: Secure localization in wireless sensor networks is the process that sensors can obtain their locations in the presence of malicious attacks.
Anchors: Anchors are special sensors that know their locations before localization through a GPS device equipped on them or through manual configurations.
Localization: Localization in wireless sensor networks is the process that all sensors obtain their relative or absolute locations, by themselves or by network computing center.
Location Verification: Location verification in wireless sensor networks is the process that correctly estimated locations of sensors can be verified and corrupted locations can be detected. Range-Based/Range-Free: A localization approach is range-based (or range-free) if it does (or does not) use the measured distance between sensors to estimation their locations.