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

Secure Mechanism For Wireless Sensor Networks - A Review

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is an emerging technology that is very usefu l for various futuristic applications both for public and military. As the use of wireless sensor networks continue to grow, so it should require effective security mechanisms. So to ensure the security of communication and data access control in WSN is paramount importance. Because sensor networks may interact with sensitive data and operate in hostile unattended environments, it is important that these security concerns should be addressed from the beginning of the system design. However because of inh erent resource and computing constraints, security in sensor networks poses different challenges than traditional network security. There is currently enormous research is present in the field of wireless sensor network security. Thus, familiarity with t he wireless sensor network,attack on WSN and security systems design for WSN will benefit researchers greatly. With this in mind , I survey the major topics in wireless sensor network security, and presentmany of the current attacks, and finally list their corresponding defensive measure

Different Security Mechanisms for Wireless Sensor Networks

In today’s world security becomes one of the important constraints in every research field. As increasing use of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) in various crucial applications security of wireless networks is becoming more important day by day. Today almost each and every important area makes use of wireless sensor networks. As Wireless Sensor Network is infrastructure-less network; data moves openly from one node to another thus it can be captured easily by attackers. To avoid data from being stolen security mechanism has to be applied. Many protocols are available for providing security on wireless network. We perform a detailed study of different security mechanisms used in sensor network against some criteria such as nature of algorithm, working, its benefits and some of the disadvantages of mechanism and also compare them

Security Challenges and Efficient Security Solutions for Ad-Hoc Wireless Sensor Network

Wireless sensor networks sense the information, process them locally and communicate it to the outside world via satellite or Internet. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) use tiny, inexpensive sensor nodes with several distinguishing characteristics: they have very low processing power and radio ranges, permit very low energy consumption and perform limited and specific monitoring and sensing functions. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are widely used for applications such as environment monitoring, habitat monitoring, forest fire control, border surveillance and health monitoring due to their capability of establishing communications among peer nodes in a self-organizing and adapting manner, without any infrastructure. Sensor networks use radio frequencies as a communication medium, which is vulnerable of all active and passive attacks from adversaries. The sensor net-work must be protected to avoid attacks from external parties. This protection is provided by the security primitives. This paper mainly concerns with problems associated in developing security protocols for wireless sensor networks, their requirements, and different types of attacks on sensor networks. This paper describes secure solutions for collecting and processing data in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Adequate security capabilities for medium and large scale WSNs are a hard but necessary goal to achieve to prepare these networks for the market. The paper also includes security and reliability challenges and also security solution for WSNs

Development of security in wireless sensor network using IPv6

The Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is one of core technologies expected to become a potential basis of future ever-present networks. WSN consists of multiple low cost sensor nodes, which could either, have a fixed location or randomly deployed that can communicate with each other for monitoring environments, medical systems, home network, industry automation and so on. However, most of the application scenarios require connectivity between WSNs and the Internet. Though WSN is typically not IP-enabled, connection to the IP network makes it easy to monitor sensors everywhere in the world. One of the purposes of the research work is to incorporate the IPv6 with WSNs, where IPv6 offers a larger address space. Therefore each of the sensor nodes will have their own IP address compare to IPv4, which has limited address space.The main objective of this research is to implement security in WSNs. Sensor networks are typically characterized by limited power supplies, low bandwidth, small memory sizes and limited energy. In addition, unlike traditional networks, sensor nodes are often deployed in accessible areas, presenting the added risk of physical attack. This leads to a very demanding environment in providing security. The research proposed XOR encryption algorithm that possesses built-in and enhanced security measure. The encryption and decryption of the payload secure the data's of the packet transfer. Other than that the XOR encryption is meant to realize the real time routing where the packets will be delivered within their end-to-end deadlines.XOR encryption security has been implemented in the 61owpan/IPv6 stack for TinyOS 2.1. TinyOS 2.1 an embedded operating system commonly used in wireless sensor networks. The hardware platforms used in this project, the TelosB motes, the 802.15.4 wireless communication standard and the TinyOS 2.1 operating syste

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