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

Trust management schemes for peer-to-peer networks

Peer-to-peer (P2P) networking enables users with similar interests to exchange, or obtain files. This network model has been proven popular to exchange music, pictures, or software applications. These files are saved, and most likely executed, at the downloading host. At the expense of this mechanism, worms, viruses, and malware find an open front door to the downloading host and gives them a convenient environment for successful proliferation throughout the network. Although virus detection software is currently available, this countermeasure works in a reactive fashion, and in most times, in an isolated manner. A trust management scheme is considered to contain the proliferation of viruses in P2P networks. Specifically, a cooperative and distributed trust management scheme based on a two-layer approach to bound the proliferation of viruses is proposed. The new scheme is called double-layer dynamic trust (DDT) management scheme. The results show that the proposed scheme bounds the proliferation of malware. With the proposed scheme, the number of infected hosts and the proliferation rate are limited to small values. In addition, it is shown that network activity is not discouraged by using the proposed scheme. Moreover, to improve the efficiency on the calculation of trust values of ratio based normalization models, a model is proposed for trust value calculation using a three-dimensional normalization to represent peer activity with more accuracy than that of a conventional ratio based normalization. Distributed network security is also considered, especially in P2P network security. For many P2P systems, including ad hoc networks and online markets, reputation systems have been considered as a solution for mitigating the affects of malicious peers. However, a sybil attack, wherein forging identities is performed to unfairly and arbitrarily influence the reputation of peers in a network or community. To defend against sybil attack, each reported transaction, which is used to calculate trust values, is verified. In this thesis, it is shown that peer reputation alone cannot bound network subversion of a sybil attack. Therefore, a new trust management framework, called Sybildefense, is introduced. This framework combines a trust management scheme with a cryptography mechanism to verify different transaction claims issue by peers, including those bogus claims of sybil peers. To improve the efficiency on the identification of honest peers from sybil peers, a k-means clustering mechanism is adopted. Moreover, to include a list of peer’s trustees in a warning messages is proposed to generate a local table for a peer that it is used to identify possible clusters of sybil peers. The defensive performance of these algorithms are compared under sybil attacks. The performance results show that the proposed framework (Sybildefense) can thwart sybil attacks efficiently

An Outline of Security in Wireless Sensor Networks: Threats, Countermeasures and Implementations

With the expansion of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the need for securing the data flow through these networks is increasing. These sensor networks allow for easy-to-apply and flexible installations which have enabled them to be used for numerous applications. Due to these properties, they face distinct information security threats. Security of the data flowing through across networks provides the researchers with an interesting and intriguing potential for research. Design of these networks to ensure the protection of data faces the constraints of limited power and processing resources. We provide the basics of wireless sensor network security to help the researchers and engineers in better understanding of this applications field. In this chapter, we will provide the basics of information security with special emphasis on WSNs. The chapter will also give an overview of the information security requirements in these networks. Threats to the security of data in WSNs and some of their counter measures are also presented