Secure Consensus Clock Synchronization in Wireless Sensor Networks

It is challenging to achieve secure clock synchronization in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), which are usually deployed in a hostile environment under potential malicious attacks. In this paper, we focus on defending the Weighted Consensus Clock Synchronization (WCCS) in WSNs. We are interested in false data injection where malicious nodes have the ability to transmit a fake synchronization message to their neighbors. To deal with such an attack, we use a statistical outlier detection method to identify malicious nodes during the synchronization process. Simulation results show that our proposal is highly robust against malicious attacks and quite accurate as all malicious nodes are exactly identified by all neighboring nodes.