One size does not fit all - how to approach intrusion detection in wireless sensor networks

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a highly distributed network of resource constrained and wireless devices called sensor nodes. In the work we consider intrusion detection systems as they are proper mechanisms to defend internal attacks on WSNs. A wide diversity of WSN applications on one side and limited resources on other side implies that "one-fit-all" intrusion detection system is not optimal. We present a conceptual proposal for a suite of tools that enable an automatic design of intrusion detection system that will be (near) optimal for a given network topology, capabilities of sensor nodes and anticipated attacks

Markov Decision Processes with Applications in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of autonomous and resource-limited devices. The devices cooperate to monitor one or more physical phenomena within an area of interest. WSNs operate as stochastic systems because of randomness in the monitored environments. For long service time and low maintenance cost, WSNs require adaptive and robust methods to address data exchange, topology formulation, resource and power optimization, sensing coverage and object detection, and security challenges. In these problems, sensor nodes are to make optimized decisions from a set of accessible strategies to achieve design goals. This survey reviews numerous applications of the Markov decision process (MDP) framework, a powerful decision-making tool to develop adaptive algorithms and protocols for WSNs. Furthermore, various solution methods are discussed and compared to serve as a guide for using MDPs in WSNs

Outlier Detection Techniques For Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

In the field of wireless sensor networks, measurements that significantly deviate from the normal pattern of sensed data are considered as outliers. The potential sources of outliers include noise and errors, events, and malicious attacks on the network. Traditional outlier detection techniques are not directly applicable to wireless sensor networks due to the multivariate nature of sensor data and specific requirements and limitations of the wireless sensor networks. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of existing outlier detection techniques specifically developed for the wireless sensor networks. Additionally, it presents a technique-based taxonomy and a decision tree to be used as a guideline to select a technique suitable for the application at hand based on characteristics such as data type, outlier type, outlier degree

Outlier detection techniques for wireless sensor networks: A survey

In the field of wireless sensor networks, those measurements that significantly deviate from the normal pattern of sensed data are considered as outliers. The potential sources of outliers include noise and errors, events, and malicious attacks on the network. Traditional outlier detection techniques are not directly applicable to wireless sensor networks due to the nature of sensor data and specific requirements and limitations of the wireless sensor networks. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of existing outlier detection techniques specifically developed for the wireless sensor networks. Additionally, it presents a technique-based taxonomy and a comparative table to be used as a guideline to select a technique suitable for the application at hand based on characteristics such as data type, outlier type, outlier identity, and outlier degree

Quarantine region scheme to mitigate spam attacks in wireless sensor networks

The Quarantine Region Scheme (QRS) is introduced to defend against spam attacks in wireless sensor networks where malicious antinodes frequently generate dummy spam messages to be relayed toward the sink. The aim of the attacker is the exhaustion of the sensor node batteries and the extra delay caused by processing the spam messages. Network-wide message authentication may solve this problem with a cost of cryptographic operations to be performed over all messages. QRS is designed to reduce this cost by applying authentication only whenever and wherever necessary. In QRS, the nodes that detect a nearby spam attack assume themselves to be in a quarantine region. This detection is performed by intermittent authentication checks. Once quarantined, a node continuously applies authentication measures until the spam attack ceases. In the QRS scheme, there is a tradeoff between the resilience against spam attacks and the number of authentications. Our experiments show that, in the worst-case scenario that we considered, a not quarantined node catches 80 percent of the spam messages by authenticating only 50 percent of all messages that it processe

An Energy Aware and Secure MAC Protocol for Tackling Denial of Sleep Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks which form part of the core for the Internet of Things consist of resource constrained sensors that are usually powered by batteries. Therefore, careful energy awareness is essential when working with these devices. Indeed,the introduction of security techniques such as authentication and encryption, to ensure confidentiality and integrity of data, can place higher energy load on the sensors. However, the absence of security protection c ould give room for energy drain attacks such as denial of sleep attacks which have a higher negative impact on the life span ( of the sensors than the presence of security features. This thesis, therefore, focuses on tackling denial of sleep attacks from two perspectives A security perspective and an energy efficiency perspective. The security perspective involves evaluating and ranking a number of security based techniques to curbing denial of sleep attacks. The energy efficiency perspective, on the other hand, involves exploring duty cycling and simulating three Media Access Control ( protocols Sensor MAC, Timeout MAC andTunableMAC under different network sizes and measuring different parameters such as the Received Signal Strength RSSI) and Link Quality Indicator ( Transmit power, throughput and energy efficiency Duty cycling happens to be one of the major techniques for conserving energy in wireless sensor networks and this research aims to answer questions with regards to the effect of duty cycles on the energy efficiency as well as the throughput of three duty cycle protocols Sensor MAC ( Timeout MAC ( and TunableMAC in addition to creating a novel MAC protocol that is also more resilient to denial of sleep a ttacks than existing protocols. The main contributions to knowledge from this thesis are the developed framework used for evaluation of existing denial of sleep attack solutions and the algorithms which fuel the other contribution to knowledge a newly developed protocol tested on the Castalia Simulator on the OMNET++ platform. The new protocol has been compared with existing protocols and has been found to have significant improvement in energy efficiency and also better resilience to denial of sleep at tacks Part of this research has been published Two conference publications in IEEE Explore and one workshop paper

Security and Privacy Issues in Wireless Mesh Networks: A Survey

This book chapter identifies various security threats in wireless mesh network (WMN). Keeping in mind the critical requirement of security and user privacy in WMNs, this chapter provides a comprehensive overview of various possible attacks on different layers of the communication protocol stack for WMNs and their corresponding defense mechanisms. First, it identifies the security vulnerabilities in the physical, link, network, transport, application layers. Furthermore, various possible attacks on the key management protocols, user authentication and access control protocols, and user privacy preservation protocols are presented. After enumerating various possible attacks, the chapter provides a detailed discussion on various existing security mechanisms and protocols to defend against and wherever possible prevent the possible attacks. Comparative analyses are also presented on the security schemes with regards to the cryptographic schemes used, key management strategies deployed, use of any trusted third party, computation and communication overhead involved etc. The chapter then presents a brief discussion on various trust management approaches for WMNs since trust and reputation-based schemes are increasingly becoming popular for enforcing security in wireless networks. A number of open problems in security and privacy issues for WMNs are subsequently discussed before the chapter is finally concluded.Comment: 62 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables. This chapter is an extension of the author's previous submission in arXiv submission: arXiv:1102.1226. There are some text overlaps with the previous submissio