An Insight into Sybil Attacks – A Bibliometric Assessment

Abstract

Sybil attack poses a significant security concern in both centralized and distributed network environments, wherein malicious adversary sabotage the network by impersonating itself as several nodes, called Sybil nodes. A Sybil attacker creates different identities for a single physical device to deceive other benign nodes, as well as uses these fake identities to hide from the detection process, thereby introducing a lack of accountability in the network. In this paper, we have thoroughly discussed the Sybil attack including its types, attack mechanisms, mitigation techniques that are in use today for the detection and prevention of such attacks. Subsequently, we have discussed the impact of the Sybil attack in various application domains and performed a bibliometric assessment in the top four scholarly databases. This will help the research community to quantitatively analyze the recent trends to determine the future research direction for the detection and prevention of such attacks.