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

Security Mechanisms in Unattended Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consisting of a large number of sensor nodes are being deployed in potentially hostile environments for applications such as forest fire detection, battlefield surveillance, habitat monitoring, traffic management, etc. One common assumption in traditional WSNs is that a trusted third party, i.e., a sink, is assumed to be always available to collect sensed data in a real time or near real time fashion. Although many WSNs operate in such an on-site mode, there are WSN applications that do not fit into the real time data collection mode. For example, data collection in Unattended WSNs (UWSNs) relies on the periodical appearance of a mobile sink. As most existing security solutions developed for traditional WSNs rely on the presence of a trusted third party, it makes them not applicable to UWSNs directly. This motivates the research on security mechanisms for UWSNs. This dissertation contributes to security mechanisms in UWSNs from three important aspects, as, confidentiality and reliability, trust management, and capture resistance. The first aspect addresses data confidentiality and data reliability in UWSNs. We propose a data distribution scheme to provide forward secrecy, probabilistic backward secrecy and data reliability. Moreover, we demonstrate that backward secrecy of the historical data can be achieved through homomorphic encryption and key evolution. Furthermore, we propose a constrained optimization algorithm to further improve the above two data distribution schemes. The second study introduces trust management in UWSNs. We propose a set of efficient and robust trust management schemes for the case of UWSNs. The Advanced Scheme utilizes distributed trust data storage to provide trust data reliability and takes the advantages of both Geographic Hash Table (GHT) and Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing (GPSR) to find storage nodes and to route trust data to them. In this way, it significantly reduces storage cost caused by distributed trust data storage and provides resilience to node compromise and node invalidation. The third study investigates how to detect a captured node and to resist node capture attack in UWSNs. We propose a node capture resistance and key refreshing scheme for UWSNs based on the Chinese remainder theorem. The scheme is able to provide forward secrecy, backward secrecy and collusion resistance for diminishing the effects of capture 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

SurvSec: A New Security Architecture for Reliable Network Recovery from Base Station Failure of Surveillance WSN

AbstractSecuring surveillance wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in hostile environments such as borders, perimeters and battlefields during Base Station (BS) failure is challenging. Surveillance WSNs are highly vulnerable to BS failure. The attackers can render the network useless by only destroying the BS as the needed efforts to destroy the BS is much less than that is needed to destroy the network. This attack scenario will give the attackers the best chance to compromise many legitimate nodes. Previous works have tackled BS failure by deploying a mobile BS or by using multiple BSs. Despite the best electronic countermeasures, intrusion tolerance and anti-traffic analysis strategies to protect the BSs, an adversary still can destroy them. This paper proposes a novel security architecture called Surveillance Security (SurvSec) for reliable network recovery from single BS failure of surveillance WSN with single BS. SurvSec relies on a set of sensor nodes serve as Security Managers for management and storage of the security related data of all sensor nodes. SurvSec security architecture provides methodologies for choosing and changing the security managers of the surveillance WSN. SurvSec has three components: (1) Sensor nodes serve as Security Managers, (2) Data Storage System, (3) Data Recovery System. Furthermore, both the frame format of the stored data is carefully built and the security threats are encoded to allow minimum overheads for SurvSec security architecture. In this paper, we provide detailed specifications of SurvSec security architecture. We evaluate our designed security architecture for reliable network recovery from BS failure. Our evaluation shows that the proposed new security architecture can meet all the desired specifications and our analysis shows that the provided Security Managers are capable of network recovery from BS failure

A Secure and Low-Energy Zone-based Wireless Sensor Networks Routing Protocol for Pollution Monitoring

[EN] Sensor networks can be used in many sorts of environments. The increase of pollution and carbon footprint are nowadays an important environmental problem. The use of sensors and sensor networks can help to make an early detection in order to mitigate their effect over the medium. The deployment of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) requires high-energy efficiency and secures mechanisms to ensure the data veracity. Moreover, when WSNs are deployed in harsh environments, it is very difficult to recharge or replace the sensor's batteries. For this reason, the increase of network lifetime is highly desired. WSNs also work in unattended environments, which is vulnerable to different sort of attacks. Therefore, both energy efficiency and security must be considered in the development of routing protocols for WSNs. In this paper, we present a novel Secure and Low-energy Zone-based Routing Protocol (SeLeZoR) where the nodes of the WSN are split into zones and each zone is separated into clusters. Each cluster is controlled by a cluster head. Firstly, the information is securely sent to the zone-head using a secret key; then, the zone-head sends the data to the base station using the secure and energy efficient mechanism. This paper demonstrates that SeLeZoR achieves better energy efficiency and security levels than existing routing protocols for WSNs.Mehmood, A.; Lloret, J.; Sendra, S. (2016). A Secure and Low-Energy Zone-based Wireless Sensor Networks Routing Protocol for Pollution Monitoring. Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing. 16(17):2869-2883. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcm.2734S286928831617Sendra S Deployment of efficient wireless sensor nodes for monitoring in rural, indoor and underwater environments 2013Javaid, N., Qureshi, T. N., Khan, A. H., Iqbal, A., Akhtar, E., & Ishfaq, M. 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Solutions and Tools for Secure Communication in Wireless Sensor Networks

Secure communication is considered a vital requirement in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications. Such a requirement embraces different aspects, including confidentiality, integrity and authenticity of exchanged information, proper management of security material, and effective prevention and reaction against security threats and attacks. However, WSNs are mainly composed of resource-constrained devices. That is, network nodes feature reduced capabilities, especially in terms of memory storage, computing power, transmission rate, and energy availability. As a consequence, assuring secure communication in WSNs results to be more difficult than in other kinds of network. In fact, trading effectiveness of adopted solutions with their efficiency becomes far more important. In addition, specific device classes or technologies may require to design ad hoc security solutions. Also, it is necessary to efficiently manage security material, and dynamically cope with changes of security requirements. Finally, security threats and countermeasures have to be carefully considered since from the network design phase. This Ph.D. dissertion considers secure communication in WSNs, and provides the following contributions. First, we provide a performance evaluation of IEEE 802.15.4 security services. Then, we focus on the ZigBee technology and its security services, and propose possible solutions to some deficiencies and inefficiencies. Second, we present HISS, a highly scalable and efficient key management scheme, able to contrast collusion attacks while displaying a graceful degradation of performance. Third, we present STaR, a software component for WSNs that secures multiple traffic flows at the same time. It is transparent to the application, and provides runtime reconfigurability, thus coping with dynamic changes of security requirements. Finally, we describe ASF, our attack simulation framework for WSNs. Such a tool helps network designers to quantitatively evaluate effects of security attacks, produce an attack ranking based on their severity, and thus select the most appropriate countermeasures

Provenance-enabled Packet Path Tracing in the RPL-based Internet of Things

The interconnection of resource-constrained and globally accessible things with untrusted and unreliable Internet make them vulnerable to attacks including data forging, false data injection, and packet drop that affects applications with critical decision-making processes. For data trustworthiness, reliance on provenance is considered to be an effective mechanism that tracks both data acquisition and data transmission. However, provenance management for sensor networks introduces several challenges, such as low energy, bandwidth consumption, and efficient storage. This paper attempts to identify packet drop (either maliciously or due to network disruptions) and detect faulty or misbehaving nodes in the Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) by following a bi-fold provenance-enabled packed path tracing (PPPT) approach. Firstly, a system-level ordered-provenance information encapsulates the data generating nodes and the forwarding nodes in the data packet. Secondly, to closely monitor the dropped packets, a node-level provenance in the form of the packet sequence number is enclosed as a routing entry in the routing table of each participating node. Lossless in nature, both approaches conserve the provenance size satisfying processing and storage requirements of IoT devices. Finally, we evaluate the efficacy of the proposed scheme with respect to provenance size, provenance generation time, and energy consumption.Comment: 14 pages, 18 Figure

Trust-based energy efficient routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consist of a number of distributed sensor nodes that are connected within a specified area. Generally, WSN is used for monitoring purposes and can be applied in many fields including health, environmental and habitat monitoring, weather forecasting, home automation, and in the military. Similar, to traditional wired networks, WSNs require security measures to ensure a trustworthy environment for communication. However, due to deployment scenarios nodes are exposed to physical capture and inclusion of malicious node led to internal network attacks hence providing the reliable delivery of data and trustworthy communication environment is a real challenge. Also, malicious nodes intentionally dropping data packets, spreading false reporting, and degrading the network performance. Trust based security solutions are regarded as a significant measure to improve the sensor network security, integrity, and identification of malicious nodes. Another extremely important issue for WSNs is energy conversation and efficiency, as energy sources and battery capacity are often limited, meaning that the implementation of efficient, reliable data delivery is an equally important consideration that is made more challenging due to the unpredictable behaviour of sensor nodes. Thus, this research aims to develop a trust and energy efficient routing protocol that ensures a trustworthy environment for communication and reliable delivery of data. Firstly, a Belief based Trust Evaluation Scheme (BTES) is proposed that identifies malicious nodes and maintains a trustworthy environment among sensor nodes while reducing the impact of false reporting. Secondly, a State based Energy Calculation Scheme (SECS) is proposed which periodically evaluates node energy levels, leading to increased network lifetime. Finally, as an integrated outcome of these two schemes, a Trust and Energy Efficient Path Selection (TEEPS) protocol has been proposed. The proposed protocol is benchmarked with A Trust-based Neighbour selection system using activation function (AF-TNS), and with A Novel Trust of dynamic optimization (Trust-Doe). The experimental results show that the proposed protocol performs better as compared to existing schemes in terms of throughput (by 40.14%), packet delivery ratio (by 28.91%), and end-to-end delay (by 41.86%). In conclusion, the proposed routing protocol able to identify malicious nodes provides a trustworthy environment and improves network energy efficiency and lifetime

MPIGA – Multipath Selection Using Improved Genetic Algorithm

The Wireless Multimedia Networks (WMNs) have developed due to the extensive applications of wireless devices and increasing availability of lower cost hardware. The WMNs are used to transmit the multimedia content like audio and video streaming and they can be deployed within a lower budget. These networks can also be used in real-time data applications that demand energy-efficient management and awareness of Quality of Service (QoS). The energy resources are limited in the wireless devices that lead to the significant threats on the QoS for WMNs. An energy-efficient routing technique is needed to handle the dynamic topology of WMN that includes a vital resource as energy. The energy-efficient routing method was proposed in this work for the purpose of data communication based on a cluster head selection from each cluster in addition to the multipath route selection to reduce the network overhead and energy consumption. The cluster heads for each cluster are selected based on Node Coverage & average residual energy parameters.In this work, the proposed energy efficient routing algorithm uses improved genetic algorithm (IGA)based on a cost function for dynamic selection of the best path. The proposed cost function uses link lifetime &average link delay parameters to estimate the link cost. The proposed algorithm’s performance compared with other previous routing methods based on extensive simulation analysis. The results showed that the proposed method achieves better performance over three other routing techniques