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

Privacy and security protection in cloud integrated sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks have been widely deployed in many social settings to monitor human activities and urban environment. In these contexts, they acquire and collect sensory data, and collaboratively fuse the data. Due to resource constraint, sensor nodes however cannot perform complex data processing. Hence, cloud-integrated sensor networks have been proposed to leverage the cloud computing capabilities for processing vast amount of heterogeneous sensory data. After being processed, the sensory data can then be accessed and shared among authorized users and applications pervasively. Various security and privacy threats can arise when the people-centric sensory data is collected and transmitted within the sensor network or from the network to the cloud; security and privacy remain a big concern when the data is later accessed and shared among different users and applications after being processed. Extensive research has been conducted to address the security and privacy issues without sacrificing resource efficiency. Unfortunately, the goals of security/privacy protection and resource efficiency may not be easy to accomplish simultaneously, and may even be sharply contrary to each other. Our research aims to reconcile the conflicts between these goals in several important contexts. Specifically, we first investigate the security and privacy protection of sensory data being transmitted within the sensor network or from the sensor network to the cloud, which includes: (1) efficient, generic privacy preserving schemes for sensory data aggregation; (2) a privacy-preserving integrity detection scheme for sensory data aggregation; (3) an efficient and source-privacy preserving scheme for catching packet droppers and modifiers. Secondly, we further study how to address people\u27s security and privacy concerns when accessing sensory data from the cloud. To preserve privacy for sensory data aggregation, we propose a set of generic, efficient and collusion-resilient privacy-preserving data aggregation schemes. On top of these privacy preserving schemes, we also develop a scheme to simultaneously achieve privacy preservation and detection of integrity attack for data aggregation. Our approach outperforms existing solutions in terms of generality, node compromise resilience, and resource efficiency. To remove the negative effects caused by packet droppers and modifiers, we propose an efficient scheme to identify and catch compromised nodes which randomly drop packets and/or modify packets. The scheme employs an innovative packet marking techniques, with which selective packet dropping and modification can be significantly alleviated while the privacy of packet sources can be preserved. To preserve the privacy of people accessing the sensory data in the cloud, we propose a new efficient scheme for resource constrained devices to verify people\u27s access privilege without exposing their identities in the presence of outsider attacks or node compromises; to achieve the fine-grained access control for data sharing, we design privacy-preserving schemes based on users\u27 affiliated attributes, such that the access policies can be flexibly specified and enforced without involving complicated key distribution and management overhead. Extensive analysis, simulations, theoretical proofs and implementations have been conducted to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed schemes. The results show that our proposed schemes resolve several limitations of existing work and achieve better performance in terms of resource efficiency, security strength and privacy preservation

Routing Security Issues in Wireless Sensor Networks: Attacks and Defenses

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are rapidly emerging as an important new area in wireless and mobile computing research. Applications of WSNs are numerous and growing, and range from indoor deployment scenarios in the home and office to outdoor deployment scenarios in adversary's territory in a tactical battleground (Akyildiz et al., 2002). For military environment, dispersal of WSNs into an adversary's territory enables the detection and tracking of enemy soldiers and vehicles. For home/office environments, indoor sensor networks offer the ability to monitor the health of the elderly and to detect intruders via a wireless home security system. In each of these scenarios, lives and livelihoods may depend on the timeliness and correctness of the sensor data obtained from dispersed sensor nodes. As a result, such WSNs must be secured to prevent an intruder from obstructing the delivery of correct sensor data and from forging sensor data. To address the latter problem, end-to-end data integrity checksums and post-processing of senor data can be used to identify forged sensor data (Estrin et al., 1999; Hu et al., 2003a; Ye et al., 2004). The focus of this chapter is on routing security in WSNs. Most of the currently existing routing protocols for WSNs make an optimization on the limited capabilities of the nodes and the application-specific nature of the network, but do not any the security aspects of the protocols. Although these protocols have not been designed with security as a goal, it is extremely important to analyze their security properties. When the defender has the liabilities of insecure wireless communication, limited node capabilities, and possible insider threats, and the adversaries can use powerful laptops with high energy and long range communication to attack the network, designing a secure routing protocol for WSNs is obviously a non-trivial task.Comment: 32 pages, 5 figures, 4 tables 4. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1011.152

Security of the Internet of Things: Vulnerabilities, Attacks and Countermeasures

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) constitute one of the most promising third-millennium technologies and have wide range of applications in our surrounding environment. The reason behind the vast adoption of WSNs in various applications is that they have tremendously appealing features, e.g., low production cost, low installation cost, unattended network operation, autonomous and longtime operation. WSNs have started to merge with the Internet of Things (IoT) through the introduction of Internet access capability in sensor nodes and sensing ability in Internet-connected devices. Thereby, the IoT is providing access to huge amount of data, collected by the WSNs, over the Internet. Hence, the security of IoT should start with foremost securing WSNs ahead of the other components. However, owing to the absence of a physical line-of-defense, i.e., there is no dedicated infrastructure such as gateways to watch and observe the flowing information in the network, security of WSNs along with IoT is of a big concern to the scientific community. More specifically, for the application areas in which CIA (confidentiality, integrity, availability) has prime importance, WSNs and emerging IoT technology might constitute an open avenue for the attackers. Besides, recent integration and collaboration of WSNs with IoT will open new challenges and problems in terms of security. Hence, this would be a nightmare for the individuals using these systems as well as the security administrators who are managing those networks. Therefore, a detailed review of security attacks towards WSNs and IoT, along with the techniques for prevention, detection, and mitigation of those attacks are provided in this paper. In this text, attacks are categorized and treated into mainly two parts, most or all types of attacks towards WSNs and IoT are investigated under that umbrella: “Passive Attacks” and “Active Attacks”. Understanding these attacks and their associated defense mechanisms will help paving a secure path towards the proliferation and public acceptance of IoT technology

ABAKA : a novel attribute-based k-anonymous collaborative solution for LBSs

The increasing use of mobile devices, along with advances in telecommunication systems, increased the popularity of Location-Based Services (LBSs). In LBSs, users share their exact location with a potentially untrusted Location-Based Service Provider (LBSP). In such a scenario, user privacy becomes a major con- cern: the knowledge about user location may lead to her identification as well as a continuous tracing of her position. Researchers proposed several approaches to preserve users’ location privacy. They also showed that hiding the location of an LBS user is not enough to guarantee her privacy, i.e., user’s pro- file attributes or background knowledge of an attacker may reveal the user’s identity. In this paper we propose ABAKA, a novel collaborative approach that provides identity privacy for LBS users considering users’ profile attributes. In particular, our solution guarantees p -sensitive k -anonymity for the user that sends an LBS request to the LBSP. ABAKA computes a cloaked area by collaborative multi-hop forwarding of the LBS query, and using Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE). We ran a thorough set of experiments to evaluate our solution: the results confirm the feasibility and efficiency of our proposal

Security in Distributed, Grid, Mobile, and Pervasive Computing

This book addresses the increasing demand to guarantee privacy, integrity, and availability of resources in networks and distributed systems. It first reviews security issues and challenges in content distribution networks, describes key agreement protocols based on the Diffie-Hellman key exchange and key management protocols for complex distributed systems like the Internet, and discusses securing design patterns for distributed systems. The next section focuses on security in mobile computing and wireless networks. After a section on grid computing security, the book presents an overview of security solutions for pervasive healthcare systems and surveys wireless sensor network security

Secure Authentication and Privacy-Preserving Techniques in Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs)

In the last decade, there has been growing interest in Vehicular Ad Hoc NETworks (VANETs). Today car manufacturers have already started to equip vehicles with sophisticated sensors that can provide many assistive features such as front collision avoidance, automatic lane tracking, partial autonomous driving, suggestive lane changing, and so on. Such technological advancements are enabling the adoption of VANETs not only to provide safer and more comfortable driving experience but also provide many other useful services to the driver as well as passengers of a vehicle. However, privacy, authentication and secure message dissemination are some of the main issues that need to be thoroughly addressed and solved for the widespread adoption/deployment of VANETs. Given the importance of these issues, researchers have spent a lot of effort in these areas over the last decade. We present an overview of the following issues that arise in VANETs: privacy, authentication, and secure message dissemination. Then we present a comprehensive review of various solutions proposed in the last 10 years which address these issues. Our survey sheds light on some open issues that need to be addressed in the future

Security protocols suite for machine-to-machine systems

Nowadays, the great diffusion of advanced devices, such as smart-phones, has shown that there is a growing trend to rely on new technologies to generate and/or support progress; the society is clearly ready to trust on next-generation communication systems to face today’s concerns on economic and social fields. The reason for this sociological change is represented by the fact that the technologies have been open to all users, even if the latter do not necessarily have a specific knowledge in this field, and therefore the introduction of new user-friendly applications has now appeared as a business opportunity and a key factor to increase the general cohesion among all citizens. Within the actors of this technological evolution, wireless machine-to-machine (M2M) networks are becoming of great importance. These wireless networks are made up of interconnected low-power devices that are able to provide a great variety of services with little or even no user intervention. Examples of these services can be fleet management, fire detection, utilities consumption (water and energy distribution, etc.) or patients monitoring. However, since any arising technology goes together with its security threats, which have to be faced, further studies are necessary to secure wireless M2M technology. In this context, main threats are those related to attacks to the services availability and to the privacy of both the subscribers’ and the services providers’ data. Taking into account the often limited resources of the M2M devices at the hardware level, ensuring the availability and privacy requirements in the range of M2M applications while minimizing the waste of valuable resources is even more challenging. Based on the above facts, this Ph. D. thesis is aimed at providing efficient security solutions for wireless M2M networks that effectively reduce energy consumption of the network while not affecting the overall security services of the system. With this goal, we first propose a coherent taxonomy of M2M network that allows us to identify which security topics deserve special attention and which entities or specific services are particularly threatened. Second, we define an efficient, secure-data aggregation scheme that is able to increase the network lifetime by optimizing the energy consumption of the devices. Third, we propose a novel physical authenticator or frame checker that minimizes the communication costs in wireless channels and that successfully faces exhaustion attacks. Fourth, we study specific aspects of typical key management schemes to provide a novel protocol which ensures the distribution of secret keys for all the cryptographic methods used in this system. Fifth, we describe the collaboration with the WAVE2M community in order to define a proper frame format actually able to support the necessary security services, including the ones that we have already proposed; WAVE2M was funded to promote the global use of an emerging wireless communication technology for ultra-low and long-range services. And finally sixth, we provide with an accurate analysis of privacy solutions that actually fit M2M-networks services’ requirements. All the analyses along this thesis are corroborated by simulations that confirm significant improvements in terms of efficiency while supporting the necessary security requirements for M2M networks

Security and Privacy for Green IoT-based Agriculture: Review, Blockchain solutions, and Challenges

open access articleThis paper presents research challenges on security and privacy issues in the field of green IoT-based agriculture. We start by describing a four-tier green IoT-based agriculture architecture and summarizing the existing surveys that deal with smart agriculture. Then, we provide a classification of threat models against green IoT-based agriculture into five categories, including, attacks against privacy, authentication, confidentiality, availability, and integrity properties. Moreover, we provide a taxonomy and a side-by-side comparison of the state-of-the-art methods toward secure and privacy-preserving technologies for IoT applications and how they will be adapted for green IoT-based agriculture. In addition, we analyze the privacy-oriented blockchain-based solutions as well as consensus algorithms for IoT applications and how they will be adapted for green IoT-based agriculture. Based on the current survey, we highlight open research challenges and discuss possible future research directions in the security and privacy of green IoT-based agriculture