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

COMPLEMENTING THE GSP ROUTING PROTOCOL IN WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

Gossip-Based Sleep Protocol (GSP) is a routing protocol in the flooding family with overhead generated by duplicate packets. GSP does not have other sources of overhead or additional information requirements common in routing protocols, such as routing packets, geographical information, addressing or explicit route computation. Because of its simple functionality, GSP is a candidate routing protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks. However, previous research showed that GSP uses the majority of energy in the network by keeping the nodes with their radios on ready to receive, even when there are no transmissions, situation known as Idle Listening. Complementing GSP implies creating additional protocols that make use of GSP particular characteristics in order to improve performance without additional overhead. The research analyzes the performance of GSP with different topologies, number of hops from source to destination and node densities, and presents one alternative protocol to complement GSP decreasing idle listening, number of duplicate packets in the network and overall energy consumption. The study compared the results of this alternative protocol, MACGSP6, to a protocol stack proposed for Wireless Sensor Networks: Sensor MAC (S-MAC) with Dynamic Source Routing (DSR), showing the advantages and disadvantages of the different approaches

Katakan tidak pada rasuah

Isu atau masalah rasuah menjadi topik utama sama ada di peringkat antarabangsa mahupun di peringkat dalam negara. Pertubuhan Bangsa- bangsa Bersatu menegaskan komitmen komuniti antarabangsa bertegas untuk mencegah dan mengawal rasuah melalui buku bertajuk United Nations Convention against Corruption. Hal yang sama berlaku di Malaysia. Melalui pernyataan visi oleh mantan Perdana Menteri Malaysia, Tun Dr. Mahathir bin Mohamed memberikan indikasi bahawa kerajaan Malaysia komited untuk mencapai aspirasi agar Malaysia dikenali kerana integriti dan bukannya rasuah. Justeru, tujuan penulisan bab ini adalah untuk membincangkan rasuah dari beberapa sudut termasuk perbincangan dari sudut agama Islam, faktor-faktor berlakunya gejala rasuah, dan usaha-usaha yang dijalankan di Malaysia untuk membanteras gejala rasuah. Perkara ini penting bagi mengenalpasti penjawat awam menanamkan keyakinan dalam melaksanakan tanggungjawab dengan menghindari diri daripada rasuah agar mereka sentiasa peka mengutamakan kepentingan awam

Resilient networking in wireless sensor networks

This report deals with security in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), especially in network layer. Multiple secure routing protocols have been proposed in the literature. However, they often use the cryptography to secure routing functionalities. The cryptography alone is not enough to defend against multiple attacks due to the node compromise. Therefore, we need more algorithmic solutions. In this report, we focus on the behavior of routing protocols to determine which properties make them more resilient to attacks. Our aim is to find some answers to the following questions. Are there any existing protocols, not designed initially for security, but which already contain some inherently resilient properties against attacks under which some portion of the network nodes is compromised? If yes, which specific behaviors are making these protocols more resilient? We propose in this report an overview of security strategies for WSNs in general, including existing attacks and defensive measures. In this report we focus at the network layer in particular, and an analysis of the behavior of four particular routing protocols is provided to determine their inherent resiliency to insider attacks. The protocols considered are: Dynamic Source Routing (DSR), Gradient-Based Routing (GBR), Greedy Forwarding (GF) and Random Walk Routing (RWR)

Car-Park Management using Wireless Sensor Networks

A complete wireless sensor network solution for car-park management is presented in this paper. The system architecture and design are first detailed, followed by a description of the current working implementation, which is based on our DSYS25z sensing nodes. Results of a series of real experimental tests regarding connectivity, sensing and network performance are then discussed. The analysis of link characteristics in the car park scenario shows unexpected reliability patterns which have a strong influence on MAC and routing protocol design. Two unexpected link reliability patterns are identified and documented. First, the presence of the objects (cars) being sensed can cause significant interference and degradation in communication performance. Second, link quality has a high temporal correlation but a low spatial correlation. From these observations we conclude that a) the construction and maintenance of a fixed topology is not useful and b) spatial rather than temporal message replicates can improve transport reliability

Secure Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as a promising concept to meet the challenges in next-generation networks such as providing flexible, adaptive, and reconfigurable architecture while offering cost-effective solutions to the service providers. Unlike traditional Wi-Fi networks, with each access point (AP) connected to the wired network, in WMNs only a subset of the APs are required to be connected to the wired network. The APs that are connected to the wired network are called the Internet gateways (IGWs), while the APs that do not have wired connections are called the mesh routers (MRs). The MRs are connected to the IGWs using multi-hop communication. The IGWs provide access to conventional clients and interconnect ad hoc, sensor, cellular, and other networks to the Internet. However, most of the existing routing protocols for WMNs are extensions of protocols originally designed for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) and thus they perform sub-optimally. Moreover, most routing protocols for WMNs are designed without security issues in mind, where the nodes are all assumed to be honest. In practical deployment scenarios, this assumption does not hold. This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of security issues in WMNs and then particularly focuses on secure routing in these networks. First, it identifies security vulnerabilities in the medium access control (MAC) and the network layers. Various possibilities of compromising data confidentiality, data integrity, replay attacks and offline cryptanalysis are also discussed. Then various types of attacks in the MAC and the network layers are discussed. After enumerating the various types of attacks on the MAC and the network layer, the chapter briefly discusses on some of the preventive mechanisms for these attacks.Comment: 44 pages, 17 figures, 5 table

On the design of an energy-efficient low-latency integrated protocol for distributed mobile sensor networks

Self organizing, wireless sensors networks are an emergent and challenging technology that is attracting large attention in the sensing and monitoring community. Impressive progress has been done in recent years even if we need to assume that an optimal protocol for every kind of sensor network applications can not exist. As a result it is necessary to optimize the protocol for certain scenarios. In many applications for instance latency is a crucial factor in addition to energy consumption. MERLIN performs its best in such WSNs where there is the need to reduce the latency while ensuring that energy consumption is kept to a minimum. By means of that, the low latency characteristic of MERLIN can be used as a trade off to extend node lifetimes. The performance in terms of energy consumption and latency is optimized by acting on the slot length. MERLIN is designed specifically to integrate routing, MAC and localization protocols together. Furthermore it can support data queries which is a typical application for WSNs. The MERLIN protocol eliminates the necessity to have any explicit handshake mechanism among nodes. Furthermore, the reliability is improved using multiple path message propagation in combination with an overhearing mechanism. The protocol divides the network into subsets where nodes are grouped in time zones. As a result MERLIN also shows a good scalability by utilizing an appropriate scheduling mechanism in combination with a contention period

An adaptive directed query dissemination scheme for wireless sensor networks

This paper describes a directed query dissemination scheme, DirQ that routes queries to the appropriate source nodes based on both constant and dynamic-valued attributes such as sensor types and sensor values. Unlike certain other query dissemination schemes, location information is not essential for the operation of DirQ. DirQ uses only locally available information in order to route queries accurately. Nodes running DirQ are able to adapt autonomously to changes in network topology due to certain cross-layer features that allow it to exchange information with the underlying MAC protocol. DirQ allows nodes to autonomously control the rate of sending update messages in order to keep the routing information updated. The rate of sending updates is dependent on both the number of queries injected into the network and the rate of variation of the measured physical parameter. Our results show that DirQ spends between 45% and 55% the cost of flooding

Atomic-SDN: Is Synchronous Flooding the Solution to Software-Defined Networking in IoT?

The adoption of Software Defined Networking (SDN) within traditional networks has provided operators the ability to manage diverse resources and easily reconfigure networks as requirements change. Recent research has extended this concept to IEEE 802.15.4 low-power wireless networks, which form a key component of the Internet of Things (IoT). However, the multiple traffic patterns necessary for SDN control makes it difficult to apply this approach to these highly challenging environments. This paper presents Atomic-SDN, a highly reliable and low-latency solution for SDN in low-power wireless. Atomic-SDN introduces a novel Synchronous Flooding (SF) architecture capable of dynamically configuring SF protocols to satisfy complex SDN control requirements, and draws from the authors' previous experiences in the IEEE EWSN Dependability Competition: where SF solutions have consistently outperformed other entries. Using this approach, Atomic-SDN presents considerable performance gains over other SDN implementations for low-power IoT networks. We evaluate Atomic-SDN through simulation and experimentation, and show how utilizing SF techniques provides latency and reliability guarantees to SDN control operations as the local mesh scales. We compare Atomic-SDN against other SDN implementations based on the IEEE 802.15.4 network stack, and establish that Atomic-SDN improves SDN control by orders-of-magnitude across latency, reliability, and energy-efficiency metrics