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

Privacy-Preserving Data Aggregation Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

Many wireless sensor network (WSN) applications require privacy-preserving aggregation of sensor data during transmission from the source nodes to the sink node. In this paper, we explore several existing privacy-preserving data aggregation (PPDA) protocols for WSNs in order to provide some insights on their current status. For this, we evaluate the PPDA protocols on the basis of such metrics as communication and computation costs in order to demonstrate their potential for supporting privacy-preserving data aggregation in WSNs. In addition, based on the existing research, we enumerate some important future research directions in the field of privacy-preserving data aggregation for WSNs

DARE: evaluating Data Accuracy using node REputation

Typical wireless sensor networks (WSNs) applications are characterized by a certain number of different requirements such as: data accuracy, localization, reputation, security, and confidentiality. Moreover, being often battery powered, WSNs face the challenge of ensuring privacy and security despite power consumption limitations. When the application scenario allows their use, data aggregation techniques can significantly reduce the amount of data exchanged over the wireless link at the price of an increased computational complexity and the potential exposition to data integrity risks in the presence of malicious nodes. In this paper, we propose DARE, an hybrid architecture combining WSNs with the wireless mesh networking paradigm in order to provide secure data aggregation and node reputation in WSNs. Finally, the use of a secure verifiable multilateration technique allows the network to retain the trustworthiness of aggregated data even in the presence of malicious node. Extensive performance evaluations carried out using simulations as well as a real-world prototype implementation, show that DARE can effectively reduce the amount of data exchanged over the wireless medium delivering up to 50% battery lifetime improvement to the wireless sensors

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

Privacy-Aware and Secure Decentralized Air Quality Monitoring

Indoor Air Quality monitoring is a major asset to improving quality of life and building management. Today, the evolution of embedded technologies allows the implementation of such monitoring on the edge of the network. However, several concerns need to be addressed related to data security and privacy, routing and sink placement optimization, protection from external monitoring, and distributed data mining. In this paper, we describe an integrated framework that features distributed storage, blockchain-based Role-based Access Control, onion routing, routing and sink placement optimization, and distributed data mining to answer these concerns. We describe the organization of our contribution and show its relevance with simulations and experiments over a set of use cases

Clustering objectives in wireless sensor networks: A survey and research direction analysis

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) typically include thousands of resource-constrained sensors to monitor their surroundings, collect data, and transfer it to remote servers for further processing. Although WSNs are considered highly flexible ad-hoc networks, network management has been a fundamental challenge in these types of net- works given the deployment size and the associated quality concerns such as resource management, scalability, and reliability. Topology management is considered a viable technique to address these concerns. Clustering is the most well-known topology management method in WSNs, grouping nodes to manage them and/or executing various tasks in a distributed manner, such as resource management. Although clustering techniques are mainly known to improve energy consumption, there are various quality-driven objectives that can be realized through clustering. In this paper, we review comprehensively existing WSN clustering techniques, their objectives and the network properties supported by those techniques. After refining more than 500 clustering techniques, we extract about 215 of them as the most important ones, which we further review, catergorize and classify based on clustering objectives and also the network properties such as mobility and heterogeneity. In addition, statistics are provided based on the chosen metrics, providing highly useful insights into the design of clustering techniques in WSNs.publishedVersio