Abstract
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have emerged as one of the hottest research areas in recent years. These networks use radio communications as a media for transmission which make them susceptible to different types of attacks. Sinkhole attack is considered as one of the severe attacks that is launched by a compromised node to attract the network traffic away from the intended route. Consequently, sinkhole attackers may run several types of attacks such as selective forwarding, denial of service (DoS), or even data fabrication attacks. In this paper, the vulnerabilities of Mintroute protocol to sinkhole attacks are discussed and the existing manual rules used for detection are investigated using different architecture. The initial experimental results with real WSN testbed show its ability in detecting sinkhole attacks for small size WSNs. Finally, the design of sinkhole detection scheme for Mintroute-based WSN is proposed.