# Depletion-of-Battery Attack: Specificity, Modelling and Analysis
## 1 Introduction  
The technology of wireless sensor systems has evolved over the last decade from where these systems were designed in a technology-dependent manner to a stage where some broad conceptual understanding of issues now exists. Significant progress in the area of micro-electro-mechanical technologies has enabled the development of inexpensive sensor nodes that communicate wirelessly. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can be used in a wide range of applications, such as air pollution monitoring [1], landslide detection [2], military applications and tracking [3], healthcare [4; 5; 6; 7], and smart homes [8; 9]. There are several projects on, and standardization initiatives for, sensor networks, which may eventually converge with the Internet of Things (IoT). For example, European Union projects of Internet of Things Architecture (IoT-A) have been addressing the challenges of IoT solutions development from a WSNs perspective [10]. As sensors-based applications are deployed, security emerges as an essential requirement. Future IoT threats will disable home security systems, flood fields, and disrupt hospitals. However, wireless sensor network survivability and reliability are low. The reasons are as follows: Sensor resources are limited. Usually, mobile terminal facilities do not allow application of an efficient defensescheme against intrusions. Wireless sensor technologies are relatively new and so, the corresponding defense tools are poor. Wireless sensors use unreliable channels. In wireless communications, the signal transmission is disturbed by noise. A sensor has to contact other sensors, which facilitates the spread of infection. Thus, it is very important to investigate potential attacks against wireless sensors and IoT systems. It is necessary to improve the security taxonomy, which can help to develop practical intrusion detection and attack mitigation systems. It is required to develop mathematical models for quantitative assessment of a safety level. There are many sources for material on security issues in WSNs. Surveys of attacks against WSNs can be found [11; 12; 13; 14]. In particular, the taxonomy of denial-of-service (DoS) attacks in WSNs was described [15]. According to these papers, attacks against sensors can be classified into attacks on the physical, medium access control (MAC), network, transportation, and application layers. A summary of typical DoS attacks on sensor networks and possible defense techniques is as follows. An approach based on spread-spectrum and a lower duty cycle is used against the jamming attack; tamper-proofing and special key management schemes are used against the tampering attack; an error correcting code is used against link layer attacks; rate limitation is used against any type of resource exhaustion; authentication, encryption, and probing are used against manipulation of routing information, selective forwarding attacks, and Sybil attacks. Both signature-based analysis and anomaly-based analysis are wide applied for DoS attacks detection in WSNs. In some cases, it is highly successful. However, traditional intrusion detection systems cannot deal with battery-depletion attacks [16]. A WSNs node is vulnerable to battery exhaustion for the following reasons. The cost of sensors has to be low; it is a market requirement. However, the cost of batteries tends to increase in proportion to their capacity. Hence, the capacity of a WSN node battery is low. In recent papers, power-exhausting attacks have been considered [17; 18; 19; 20; 21]. The authors considered these attacks as a special type of DoS attack, as well. However, the situation introduced in this paper has not been considered. Quality of service under a battery depletion attack is not necessarily degraded. Moreover, quality of service can increase, right up to the moment some critical set of sensors crashes. This gives rise to a novel type of attack that is not DoS. Let us assume the following scenario. Malware in an infected sensor forces the sensor transmitter to essentially increase signal power.