Security in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) pose a new challenge to network designers in the area of developing better and secure routing protocols. Many sensor networks have mission-critical tasks, so it is clear that security needs to be taken into account at design time. However, sensor networks are not traditional computing devices, and as a result, existing security models and methods are ill suited. The security issues posed by sensor networks represent a rich field of research problems. Improving network hardware and software may address many of the issues, but others will require new supporting technologies. With the recent surge in the use of sensor networks, for example, in ubiquitous computing and body sensor networks (BSNs) the need for security mechanisms has a more important role. Recently proposed solutions address but a small subset of current sensor network attacks. Also because of the special battery requirements for such networks, normal cryptographic network solutions are irrelevant. New mechanisms need to be developed to address this type of network

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

Protocols for Detection and Removal of Wormholes for Secure Routing and Neighborhood Creation in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Wireless ad hoc networks are suitable and sometimes the only solution for several applications. Many applications, particularly those in military and critical civilian domains (such as battlefield surveillance and emergency rescue) require that ad hoc networks be secure and stable. In fact, security is one of the main barriers to the extensive use of ad hoc networks in many operations. The primary objective of this dissertation is to propose protocols which will protect ad hoc networks from wormhole attacks - one of the most devastating security attacks - and to improve network stability. Protocols that depend solely on cryptography techniques such as authentication and encryption can prevent/detect several types of security attacks; however, they will not be able to detect or prevent a wormhole attack. This attack on routing in ad hoc networks is also considered to be the main threat against neighborhood discovery protocols. Most of the proposed mechanisms designed to defend against this type of attack are based on location information or time measurements, or require additional hardware or a central entity. Other protocols that relied on connectivity or neighborhood information cannot successfully detect all of the various types and cases of wormhole attacks. In the first part of this dissertation, we present a simple, yet effective protocol to detect wormhole attacks along routes in ad hoc networks. The protocol is evaluated using analysis and simulations. In the second part, we present a secure neighbor creation protocol that can securely discover the neighbors of a node in ad hoc networks, and detect and remove wormhole links, if they exist. The proposed protocols do not require any location information, time synchronization, or special hardware to detect wormhole attacks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first protocol that makes use of cooperation rules between honest nodes. Use of such rules will reduce the overhead associated with the number of checks to be performed in order to detect wormholes and to create a secure neighborhood. This is also the first protocol, to our knowledge, that addresses the complete removal of bogus links without removing legal links

A Unified Wormhole Attack Detection Framework for Mobile Ad hoc Networks

The Internet is experiencing an evolution towards a ubiquitous network paradigm, via the so-called internet-of-things (IoT), where small wireless computing devices like sensors and actuators are integrated into daily activities. Simultaneously, infrastructure-less systems such as mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) are gaining popularity since they provide the possibility for devices in wireless sensor networks or vehicular ad hoc networks to share measured and monitored information without having to be connected to a base station. While MANETs offer many advantages, including self-configurability and application in rural areas which lack network infrastructure, they also present major challenges especially in regard to routing security. In a highly dynamic MANET, where nodes arbitrarily join and leave the network, it is difficult to ensure that nodes are trustworthy for multi-hop routing. Wormhole attacks belong to most severe routing threats because they are able to disrupt a major part of the network traffic, while concomitantly being extremely difficult to detect. This thesis presents a new unified wormhole attack detection framework which is effective for all known wormhole types, alongside incurring low false positive rates, network loads and computational time, for a variety of diverse MANET scenarios. The framework makes three original technical contributions: i) a new accurate wormhole detection algorithm based on packet traversal time and hop count analysis (TTHCA) which identifies infected routes, ii) an enhanced, dynamic traversal time per hop analysis (TTpHA) detection model which is adaptable to node radio range fluctuations, and iii) a method for automatically detecting time measurement tampering in both TTHCA and TTpHA. The thesis findings indicate that this new wormhole detection framework provides significant performance improvements compared to other existing solutions by accurately, efficiently and robustly detecting all wormhole variants under a wide range of network conditions