Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs): Security and Privacy Issues and Solutions

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have become one of the current research areas, and it proves to be a very supportive technology for various applications such as environmental-, military-, health-, home-, and office-based applications. WSN can either be mobile wireless sensor network (MWSN) or static wireless sensor network (SWSN). MWSN is a specialized wireless network consisting of considerable number of mobile sensors, however the instability of its topology introduces several performance issues during data routing. SWSNs consisting of static nodes with static topology also share some of the security challenges of MWSNs due to some constraints associated with the sensor nodes. Security, privacy, computation and energy constraints, and reliability issues are the major challenges facing WSNs, especially during routing. To solve these challenges, WSN routing protocols must ensure confidentiality, integrity, privacy preservation, and reliability in the network. Thus, efficient and energy-aware countermeasures have to be designed to prevent intrusion in the network. In this chapter, we describe different forms of WSNs, challenges, solutions, and a point-to-point multi-hop-based secure solution for effective routing in WSNs

SRP-HEE: A Modified Stateless Routing Protocol based on Homomorphic Energy based Encryption for Wireless Sensor Network

Due to the wireless nature, the sensors node data are prone to location privacy of source and classification of the packet by unauthorized parties. Data encryption is one of the most effective ways to thwart unauthorized access to the data and trace information. Traditional wireless network security solutions are not viable for WSNs In this paper, a novel distributed forward aware factor based heuristics towards generating greedy routing using stateless routing is SRP-HEE for wireless sensor network. The model employs the homomorphic Energy based encryption technique. Energy based Encryption model is devoted as homomorphic mechanism due to their less computational complexity. Additionally, privacy constraint becoming a critical issue in the wireless sensor networks (WSNs) because sensor nodes are generally prone to attacks which deplete energy quickly as it is exposed to mobile sink frequently for data transmission. Through inclusion of the Forward aware factor on the Greedy routing strategies, it is possible to eliminate the attacking node which is depleting the energy of the source node. Heuristic conditions are used for optimizing the sampling rate and battery level for tackling the battery capacity constraints of the wireless sensor nodes. The Node characteristics of the propagating node have been analysed utilizing kalman filter and linear regression. The cooperative caching of the network information will enable to handle the fault condition by changing the privacy level of the network. The Simulation results demonstrate that SRP-HEE model outperforms existing technique on basis of Latency, Packet Delivery Ratio, Network Overhead, and Energy Utilization of nodes

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

Smart Signs: Showing the way in Smart Surroundings

This paper presents a context-aware guidance and messaging system for large buildings and surrounding venues. Smart Signs are a new type of electronic door- and way-sign based on wireless sensor networks. Smart Signs present in-situ personalized guidance and messages, are ubiquitous, and easy to understand. They combine the easiness of use of traditional static signs with the flexibility and reactiveness of navigation systems. The Smart Signs system uses context information such as user’s mobility limitations, the weather, and possible emergency situations to improve guidance and messaging. Minimal infrastructure requirements and a simple deployment tool make it feasible to easily deploy a Smart Signs system on demand. An important design issue of the Smart Signs system is privacy: the system secures communication links, does not track users, allow almost complete anonymous use, and prevent the system to be used as a tool for spying on users

On the tradeoff between privacy and energy in wireless sensor networks

Source location privacy is becoming an increasingly important property of some wireless sensor network applica- tions. The fake source technique has been proposed as an approach for handling the source location privacy problem in these situations. However, whilst the efficiency of the fake source techniques is well documented, there are several factors that limit the usefulness of current results: (i) the assumption that fake sources are known a priori, (ii) the selection of fake sources based on an prohibitively expensive pre-configuration phase and (iii) the lack of a commonly adopted attacker model. In this paper we address these limitations by investigating the efficiency of the fake source technique with respect to possible implementations, configurations and extensions that do not require a pre-configuration phase or a priori knowledge of fake sources. The results presented demonstrate that one possible implementation, in presence of a single attacker, can lead to a decrease in capture ratio of up to 60% when compared with a flooding baseline. In the presence of multiple attackers, the same implementation yields only a 30% decrease in capture ratio with respect to the same baseline. To address this problem we investigate a hybrid technique, known as phantom routing with fake sources, which achieves a corresponding 50% reduction in capture ratio