A Survey on Wireless Sensor Network Security

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.Comment: 24 pages, 4 figures, 2 table

Survey and Systematization of Secure Device Pairing

Secure Device Pairing (SDP) schemes have been developed to facilitate secure communications among smart devices, both personal mobile devices and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Comparison and assessment of SDP schemes is troublesome, because each scheme makes different assumptions about out-of-band channels and adversary models, and are driven by their particular use-cases. A conceptual model that facilitates meaningful comparison among SDP schemes is missing. We provide such a model. In this article, we survey and analyze a wide range of SDP schemes that are described in the literature, including a number that have been adopted as standards. A system model and consistent terminology for SDP schemes are built on the foundation of this survey, which are then used to classify existing SDP schemes into a taxonomy that, for the first time, enables their meaningful comparison and analysis.The existing SDP schemes are analyzed using this model, revealing common systemic security weaknesses among the surveyed SDP schemes that should become priority areas for future SDP research, such as improving the integration of privacy requirements into the design of SDP schemes. Our results allow SDP scheme designers to create schemes that are more easily comparable with one another, and to assist the prevention of persisting the weaknesses common to the current generation of SDP schemes.Comment: 34 pages, 5 figures, 3 tables, accepted at IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials 2017 (Volume: PP, Issue: 99

Cluster-based trust proliferation and energy efficient data collection in unattended wireless sensor networks with mobile sinks

Wireless sensor networks are relatively simple, scalable networks with many applications in the research field. They can provide benefits that a typical wireless network does not, such as ad-hoc distribution, lower costs, and higher flexibility. In a scenario where time is of the essence and dedicated base stations cannot be established, such as a storm or a volcanic eruption, mobile sinks must be used to gather data. We aim to introduce a fast cluster-based mechanism by which nodes can securely connect to one another based on trust and network clustering and begin transmitting data to a collection device while it is available. We also examine two possible attacks on a trust-based network, and present a heuristic solution for minimizing the negative effects of such an attack in an energy-efficient way. Through simulation, we show that this scheme performs better than others in terms of energy efficiency and network lifespan

PADS: Practical Attestation for Highly Dynamic Swarm Topologies

Remote attestation protocols are widely used to detect device configuration (e.g., software and/or data) compromise in Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios. Unfortunately, the performances of such protocols are unsatisfactory when dealing with thousands of smart devices. Recently, researchers are focusing on addressing this limitation. The approach is to run attestation in a collective way, with the goal of reducing computation and communication. Despite these advances, current solutions for attestation are still unsatisfactory because of their complex management and strict assumptions concerning the topology (e.g., being time invariant or maintaining a fixed topology). In this paper, we propose PADS, a secure, efficient, and practical protocol for attesting potentially large networks of smart devices with unstructured or dynamic topologies. PADS builds upon the recent concept of non-interactive attestation, by reducing the collective attestation problem into a minimum consensus one. We compare PADS with a state-of-the art collective attestation protocol and validate it by using realistic simulations that show practicality and efficiency. The results confirm the suitability of PADS for low-end devices, and highly unstructured networks.Comment: Submitted to ESORICS 201

Trust model genetic node recovery based on cloud theory for underwater acoustic sensor network

Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks [UASNs] are becoming a very growing research topic in the field of WSNs. UASNs are harmful by many attacks such as Jamming attacks at the physical layer, Collision attacks at the data link layer and Dos attacks at the network layer. UASNs has a unique characteristic such as unreliable communication, mobility, and computation of underwater sensor network. Because of this the traditional security mechanism, e.g. cryptographic, encryption, authorization and authentications are not suitable for UASNs. Many trust mechanisms of TWSNs [Terrestrial Wireless Sensor Networks] had proposed to UASNs and failed to provide security for UASNs environment, due to dynamic network structure and weak link connection between sensors. In this paper, a novel Trust Model Genetic Algorithm based on Cloud Theory [TMC] for UASNs has been proposed. The TMC-GA suggested a genetic node recovery algorithm to improve the TMC network in terms of better network lifetime, residual energy and total energy consumption. Also ensures that sensor nodes are participating in the rerouting in the routing discovery and performs well in terms of successful packet delivery. Simulation result provides that the proposed TMC-Genetic node recovery algorithm outperforms compared to other related works in terms of the number of hops, end-to-end delay, total energy consumption, residual energy, routing overhead, throughput and network lifetime

A survey of localization in wireless sensor network

Localization is one of the key techniques in wireless sensor network. The location estimation methods can be classified into target/source localization and node self-localization. In target localization, we mainly introduce the energy-based method. Then we investigate the node self-localization methods. Since the widespread adoption of the wireless sensor network, the localization methods are different in various applications. And there are several challenges in some special scenarios. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of these challenges: localization in non-line-of-sight, node selection criteria for localization in energy-constrained network, scheduling the sensor node to optimize the tradeoff between localization performance and energy consumption, cooperative node localization, and localization algorithm in heterogeneous network. Finally, we introduce the evaluation criteria for localization in wireless sensor network

A Comprehensive Survey on Routing and Security in Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks

With the continuous advances in mobile wirelesssensor networks (MWSNs), the research community hasresponded to the challenges and constraints in the design of thesenetworks by proposing efficient routing protocols that focus onparticular performance metrics such as residual energy utilization,mobility, topology, scalability, localization, data collection routing,Quality of Service (QoS), etc. In addition, the introduction ofmobility in WSN has brought new challenges for the routing,stability, security, and reliability of WSNs. Therefore, in thisarticle, we present a comprehensive and meticulous investigationin the routing protocols and security challenges in the theory ofMWSNs which was developed in recent years