Various means of attack on wireless sensor networks have
been covered by the literature. Ahmed et al. [8] assert that
“sensor networks are highly susceptible to denial of service
attacks due to their inherent characteristics, i.e., low com-putational power, limited memory and communication band-width coupled with the use of an insecure wireless channel.”
Black hole attacks in sensor networks can be mitigated using
authorization, monitoring and redundancy. Authorization uses
cryptographic methods to ensure that nodes that are sending
out routing updates do so legitimately and ensures that spoofed
messages can be identified. Redundancy is a technique that
takes advantage of multiple routing paths to the destination to
mitigate the effects of black hole nodes. Monitoring aims to
identify malicious activity by examining network announce-ments to identify anomalies