Anomaly detection of data and topology patterns in WSNs

Robert Zakrzewski, Trevor Martin, George Oikonomou

Abstract: Wireless sensor networks are often distributed which makes detection of cyber-attacks or misconfiguration hard. Topology and data patterns change may result from attacks leading to the compromise of data and service availability or indicate operational problems. Graphs are often used to model topology and data paths to describe and compare state of a system. For anomaly detection, the definition of normal patterns, deviation from normal, and criteria when to declare anomaly are required. In this contribution the process of acquisition of normal patterns (ground truth), and criteria when to declare anomaly based on graph comparison are proposed. The anomaly detection is suitable for deployment at the edge of a network. Finally, the inability to define all security threats is addressed by a custom tree-based classifier which only requires normal patterns for training. A simulated wireless sensor network was used to acquire data and apply the method. Our experiments show that data and topology change can be detected at the edge of a network.