An Insight into Sybil Attacks – A Bibliometric Assessment

Sybil attack poses a significant security concern in both centralized and distributed network environments, wherein malicious adversary sabotage the network by impersonating itself as several nodes, called Sybil nodes. A Sybil attacker creates different identities for a single physical device to deceive other benign nodes, as well as uses these fake identities to hide from the detection process, thereby introducing a lack of accountability in the network. In this paper, we have thoroughly discussed the Sybil attack including its types, attack mechanisms, mitigation techniques that are in use today for the detection and prevention of such attacks. Subsequently, we have discussed the impact of the Sybil attack in various application domains and performed a bibliometric assessment in the top four scholarly databases. This will help the research community to quantitatively analyze the recent trends to determine the future research direction for the detection and prevention of such attacks

Designing Efficient Sinkhole Attack Detection Mechanism in Edge-Based IoT Deployment

The sinkhole attack in an edge-based Internet of Things (IoT) environment (EIoT) can devastate and ruin the whole functioning of the communication. The sinkhole attacker nodes ( S H A s) have some properties (for example, they first attract the other normal nodes for the shortest path to the destination and when normal nodes initiate the process of sending their packets through that path (i.e., via S H A ), the attacker nodes start disrupting the traffic flow of the network). In the presence of S H A s, the destination (for example, sink node i.e., gateway/base station) does not receive the required information or it may receive partial or modified information. This results in reduction of the network performance and degradation in efficiency and reliability of the communication. In the presence of such an attack, the throughput decreases, end-to-end delay increases and packet delivery ratio decreases. Moreover, it may harm other network performance parameters. Hence, it becomes extremely essential to provide an effective and competent scheme to mitigate this attack in EIoT. In this paper, an intrusion detection scheme to protect EIoT environment against sinkhole attack is proposed, which is named as SAD-EIoT. In SAD-EIoT, the resource rich edge nodes (edge servers) perform the detection of different types of sinkhole attacker nodes with the help of exchanging messages. The practical demonstration of SAD-EIoT is also provided using the well known NS2 simulator to compute the various performance parameters. Additionally, the security analysis of SAD-EIoT is conducted to prove its resiliency against various types of S H A s. SAD-EIoT achieves around 95.83 % detection rate and 1.03 % false positive rate, which are considerably better than other related existing schemes. Apart from those, SAD-EIoT is proficient with respect to computation and communication costs. Eventually, SAD-EIoT will be a suitable match for those applications which can be used in critical and sensitive operations (for example, surveillance, security and monitoring systems)