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

LEE: Light‐Weight Energy‐Efficient encryption algorithm for sensor networks

Data confidentiality in wireless sensor networks is mainly achieved by RC5 and Skipjack encryption algorithms. However, both algorithms have their weaknesses, for example RC5 supports variable-bit rotations, which are computationally expensive operations and Skipjack uses a key length of 80-bits, which is subject to brute force attack. In this paper we introduce a light-weight energy- fficient encryption-algorithm (LEE) for tiny embedded devices, such as sensor network nodes. We present experimental results of LEE under real sensor nodes operating in TinyOS. We also discuss the secrecy of our algorithm by presenting a security analysis of various tests and cryptanalytic attacks

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

Optimized Load Centroid and Rabin Onion Secured Routing in Wireless Sensor Network for IoT

Advances in wireless communication have geared up extensive insights wherein the sensors can themselves communicate with other sensors that form significant parts of the Internet of Things (IoT). However, the large-scale acceptance of WSN for IoT is still surfacing threats and controversies that apprehend the security aspects. There are a lot of attacks that can manipulate the routein WSN for IoT. In this work, an Optimized Load Centroid and Rabin Onion Routing (OLC-ROR) method are designed to improve the throughput rate with minimum routing overhead and latency. The proposed method is based on a Centroid and Rabin Signature, a Digital Signature technique. First, the optimal route is identified by considering both the load and residual energy using Load Centroid function. Then onion routing is used for selecting secured route amongst the optimality. Besides, the node genuineness is checked by applying the Rabin Signature

Optimized Load Centroid and Rabin Onion Secured Routing in Wireless Sensor Network for IoT

Advances in wireless communication have geared up extensive insights wherein the sensors can themselves communicate with other sensors that form significant parts of the Internet of Things (IoT). However, the large-scale acceptance of WSN for IoT is still surfacing threats and controversies that apprehend the security aspects. There are a lot of attacks that can manipulate the routein WSN for IoT. In this work, an Optimized Load Centroid and Rabin Onion Routing (OLC-ROR) method are designed to improve the throughput rate with minimum routing overhead and latency. The proposed method is based on a Centroid and Rabin Signature, a Digital Signature technique. First, the optimal route is identified by considering both the load and residual energy using Load Centroid function. Then onion routing is used for selecting secured route amongst the optimality. Besides, the node genuineness is checked by applying the Rabin Signature