MDoC: Compromising WRSNs through Denial of Charge by Mobile Charger

The discovery of wireless power transfer technology enables power transferred between transceivers in a wireless manner, thus generating the concept of wireless rechargeable sensor networks (WRSNs). Previous arts paid little attention to network security issues, making them prone to novel attacks. In this work, we focus on developing a denial of charge attack for WRSNs, which aims at corrupting network functionalities by manipulating the malicious mobile charger. We formalize the maximization of destructiveness problem (MAD) and propose a denial of charge attacking method, termed MDoC, with a performance guarantee to solve it. MDoC is composed of two attacking rounds, which first triggers sensors to send requests to create a request explosion phenomenon and then figures out the longest charging route to yield nodes starving to death as much as possible. Finally, extensive testbed experiments and simulations are conducted to verify the performance of MDoC. The results reveal that MDoC attack is able to exhaust at least 20% additional nodes without being noticed.