Defending ON-OFF Attacks Using Light Probing Messages in Smart Sensors for Industrial Communication Systems

Industrial communication systems (ICSs) have become an important part of many automated applications. Smart sensors for ICSs have attracted much attention. Using smart sensors for ICSs can allow the surrounding world to connect with the production equipment to reduce human resource requirements. However, due to their operating nature, smart sensors are often unattended and prone to different kinds of attacks. An on-off attack is one behavior that can cause serious damage to wireless sensor networks in ICSs. To ensure network security, a trust joint light probe based defense (TLPD) mechanism is proposed in which each smart sensor node selects a smart sensor node with high trust as the next hop to improve network security. The TLPD scheme is constituted by three major components, including light probe routing, trust estimation, and trust-aware routing. Light probe routing is adopted for increasing the operation times of malicious nodes, and a trust evaluation scheme evaluates nodes trust according to operation behavior of nodes. Thus, the discrimination degree of node trust between temporary errors and disguised malicious behaviors can be increased compared to existing trust evaluation schemes. Thus, a malicious smart sensor node can be quickly and easily identified. The analytical results of the TLPD mechanism assessed are with a simulation experiment.