As wireless sensor networks continue to grow, so does the need for effective security mechanisms. Because sensor networks may interact with sensitive data and/or operate in hostile unattended environments, it is imperative that these security concerns be addressed from the beginning of the system design. However, due to inherent resource and computing constraints, security in sensor networks poses different challenges than traditional network/computer security. There is currently enormous research potential in the field of wireless sensor network security. Thus, familiarity with the current research in this field will benefit researchers greatly. With this in mind, we survey the major topics in wireless sensor network security, and present the obstacles and the requirements in the sensor security, classify many of the current attacks, and finally list their corresponding defensive measures.

Wireless Sensor Network Security: A Survey

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have recently attracted a lot of interest in the research community due their wide range of applications. Due to distributed nature of these networks and their deployment in remote areas, these networks are vulnerable to numerous security threats that can adversely affect their proper functioning. This problem is more critical if the network is deployed for some mission-critical applications such as in a tactical battlefield. Random failure of nodes is also very likely in real-life deployment scenarios. Due to resource constraints in the sensor nodes, traditional security mechanisms with large overhead of computation and communication are infeasible in WSNs. Security in sensor networks is, therefore, a particularly challenging task. This paper discusses the current state of the art in security mechanisms for WSNs. Various types of attacks are discussed and their countermeasures presented. A brief discussion on the future direction of research in WSN security is also included.

A Survey on Wireless Sensor Network Security

https://www.ijcnis.org/index.php/ijcnis/article/download/16/16

The multihop routing in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) offers little protection against identity deception through replaying routing information. An adversary can exploit this defect to launch various harmful or even devastating attacks against the routing protocols, including sinkhole attacks, wormhole attacks, and Sybil attacks. The situation is further aggravated by mobile and harsh network conditions. Traditional cryptographic techniques or efforts at developing trust-aware routing protocols do not effectively address this severe problem. To secure the WSNs against adversaries misdirecting the multihop routing, we have designed and implemented TARF, a robust trust-aware routing framework for dynamic WSNs. Without tight time synchronization or known geographic information, TARF provides trustworthy and energy-efficient route. Most importantly, TARF proves effective against those harmful attacks developed out of identity deception; the resilience of TARF is verified through extensive evaluation with both simulation and empirical experiments on large-scale WSNs under various scenarios including mobile and RF-shielding network conditions. Further, we have implemented a low-overhead TARF module in TinyOS; as demonstrated, this implementation can be incorporated into existing routing protocols with the least effort. Based on TARF, we also demonstrated a proof-of-concept mobile target detection application that functions well against an antidetection mechanism.

Design and Implementation of TARF: A Trust-Aware Routing Framework for WSNs

Networks of wireless microsensors for monitoring physical environments have emerged as an important new application area for wireless technology. Key attributes of these new types of networked systems are the severely constrained computational and energy resources, and an ad hoc operational environment. This paper is a study of the communication security aspects of these networks. Resource limitations and specific architecture of sensor networks call for customized security mechanisms. Our approach is to classify the types of data existing in sensor networks, and identify possible communication security threats according to that classification. We propose a communication security scheme where for each type of data we define a corresponding security mechanism. By employing this multitiered security architecture where each mechanism has different resource requirements, we allow for efficient resource management, which is essential for wireless sensor networks.

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On communication security in wireless ad-hoc sensor networks

Ad hoc networks are new paradigm of networks offering unrestricted mobility without any underlying infrastructure. The ad hoc networks have salient characteristics that are totally different from conventional networks. These cause extra challenges on security. In an ad hoc network, each node should not trust any peer. However, traditional cryptographic solution is useless against threats from internal compromised nodes. Thus, new mechanisms are needed to provide effective security solution for the ad hoc networks. In this paper, a trust evaluation based security solution is proposed to provide effective security decision on data protection, secure routing and other network activities. Logical and computational trust analysis and evaluation are deployed among network nodes. Each node's evaluation of trust on other nodes should be based on serious study and inference from such trust factors as experience statistics, data value, intrusion detection result, and references of other nodes, as well as node owner's preference and policy. In order to prove the applicability of the proposed solution, authors further present a routing protocol and analyze its security over several active attacks.

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Teemupekka Virtanen

Papers

Trust Evaluation Based Security Solution in Ad Hoc Networks