Sybil Attack Detection: Improving Security of WSNs for Smart Power Grid Application

For a large number of sensor network applications security is crucial, especially if the sensor network protects or monitors critical infrastructures such as electric powerinfrastructure. Smart grid revolutionizes the current electric power infrastructure by the use of wireless sensor networks.Sybil attack is one of the most disrupting attacks in the contextof wireless sensor networks. In this attack a malicious node forges multiple identities and therefore disrupts many networkprotocols such as routing, voting, data aggregation and misbehavior detection. This attack can make several forms ofattacks possible. It is also problematic for protocols that rely on voting schemes. Therefore a security mechanism against thisattack for wireless sensor networks is mandatory. In this paper we introduced a novel approach called SDTM (Sybil attack Detection using Traffic Monitoring) in a neighborbaseddetection manner to detect such attacks. This approach is based on the traffic density around nodes and uses statisticalmethods to detect the malicious nodes. For simulating our network we used OMNeT++ simulator. After 80 simulations the proposed mechanism (SDTM) achieved a 95.13% detection rate and a 2.29% misdetection rate. we have shown that the occurrence of a Sybil attack using this method is detectable