Abstract Vehicle cloud is a new idea that uses the benefits of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and the concept of cloud computing to provide better services to the community. It is important to secure a sensor network to achieve better performance of the vehicle cloud. Wireless sensor networks are a soft target for intruders or adversaries to launch lethal attacks in its present configuration. In this paper, a novel intrusion detection framework is proposed for securing wireless sensor networks from routing attacks. The proposed system works in a distributed environment to detect intrusions by collaborating with the neighboring nodes. It works in two modes: online prevention allows safeguarding from those abnormal nodes that are already declared as malicious while offline detection finds those nodes that are being compromised by an adversary during the next epoch of time. Simulation results show that the proposed specification-based detection scheme performs extremely well and achieves high intrusion detection rate and low false positive rate
