Security in Wireless Sensor Networks: Issues and Challenges

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is an emerging technology that shows great promise for various futuristic applications both for mass public and military. The sensing technology combined with processing power and wireless communication makes it lucrative for being exploited in abundance in future. The inclusion of wireless communication technology also incurs various types of security threats. The intent of this paper is to investigate the security related issues and challenges in wireless sensor networks. We identify the security threats, review proposed security mechanisms for wireless sensor networks. We also discuss the holistic view of security for ensuring layered and robust security in wireless sensor networks.Comment: 6 page

Detecting malfunction in wireless sensor networks

The objective of this thesis is to detect malfunctioning sensors in wireless sensor networks. The ability to detect abnormality is critical to the security of any sensor network. However, the ability to detect a faulty wireless sensor is not trivial. Controlled repeatable experiments are difficult in wireless channels. A Redhat Linux. 7.0 Wireless Emulation Dynamic Switch software was used to solve this problem. Six nodes were configured with a node acting as a base station. The nodes were all part of a cell. This means that every node could communicate with all other nodes. A client-server program simulated the background traffic. Another program simulated a faulty node. A node was isolated as the faulty node while all other nodes were good. The experiment ran for several hours and the data was captured with tcpdump. The data was analyzed to conclusions based on a statistical comparison of good node versus bad node. The statistical delay on the good node was an average of 0.69 ms while the standard deviation was 0.49. This was much better than the delay on the bad node that was 0.225192 s with a standard deviation of 0.89. This huge difference in the delay indicated that the faulty node was detected statistically. A threshold value of I ms was chosen. The good node was within this value about 98% of the time. The bad node on the other hand was far out of this range and was definitely detected. The channel utilization data provided the same conclusion

ANGELAH: A Framework for Assisting Elders At Home

The ever growing percentage of elderly people within modern societies poses welfare systems under relevant stress. In fact, partial and progressive loss of motor, sensorial, and/or cognitive skills renders elders unable to live autonomously, eventually leading to their hospitalization. This results in both relevant emotional and economic costs. Ubiquitous computing technologies can offer interesting opportunities for in-house safety and autonomy. However, existing systems partially address in-house safety requirements and typically focus on only elder monitoring and emergency detection. The paper presents ANGELAH, a middleware-level solution integrating both ”elder monitoring and emergency detection” solutions and networking solutions. ANGELAH has two main features: i) it enables efficient integration between a variety of sensors and actuators deployed at home for emergency detection and ii) provides a solid framework for creating and managing rescue teams composed of individuals willing to promptly assist elders in case of emergency situations. A prototype of ANGELAH, designed for a case study for helping elders with vision impairments, is developed and interesting results are obtained from both computer simulations and a real-network testbed

Performance and security measure of clustering protocols for sensor networks

Micro sensor nodes are now easily available and are very cheap. These resource constrained nodes are spread in remote locations to gather data. There are some energy efficient clustering protocols that are known to work well for sensor networks. The performance of these algorithms are mainly measured by the their energy consumption. In this thesis, we develop a performance measure for these algorithms that includes the energy spent, the time delay incurred in the whole process and the information loss. We have formulated a novel metric, the entropy based information loss metric, which to the best of our knowledge has not been previously addressed. We then optimize the joint performance measure which is a combination of these different metrics to yield the optimal clustering configuration.;Security is a key concern in many sensor network scenarios. In this thesis we analyze the performance differences in existing clustering protocols when security is added. In particular, we analyze how the optimal configuration of the LEACH protocol changes when we apply a pre deployment key distribution based security protocol to it.;The final contribution of this thesis is a new secure clustering protocol for sensor networks. In particular, this is a grid based secure solution to a commonly used clustering protocol, the LEACH protocol. We show that our protocol, the GS-LEACH protocol is more energy efficient than any of the existing secure flavors of LEACH. In addition, our protocol is more scalable to regions of different shapes and sizes and provides uniform coverage due to the grid structure of the clusters, thereby guaranteeing a better quality of the information collected

Clone Detection for Efficient System in WSN using AODV

Wireless sensor is wide deployed for a spread of application, starting from surroundings observance to telemedicine and objects chase, etc. For value effective sensing element placement, sensors are usually not tamperproof device and are deployed in places while not observance and protection, that creates them at risk of fully different attacks. As an example, a malicious user may compromise some sensors and acquire their private information. Then, it?ll duplicate the detectors and deploy clones in an exceedingly wireless sensor network (WSN) to launch a spread of attack that?s mentioned as clone attack. Because the duplicated sensors have an equivalent information, e.g., code and crypto graphical information, captured from legitimate sensors that may merely participate in network operation and launch attacks. Because of the low value for sensing components duplication and preparation, clone attacks became one in all the foremost essential security issues in WSNs. Thus, it?s essential to effectively detect clone attacks therefore to ensure healthy operation of WSNs