International Journal of Information & Computation Technology.

ISSN 0974-2239 Volume 4, Number 8 (2014), pp. 859-868

© International Research Publications House
http://www. irphouse.com

Wireless Sensor Networks: Security Issues, Challenges and

Solutions

Vikash Kumar1, Anshu Jain2and P N Barwal3

1, 2, 3
e-Governance, C-DAC,
C-56/1, GB NAGAR, NOIDA, INDIA

ABSTRACT

The emergence of wireless sensor networks (WSN) as one of the dominant

technology trends in the coming decades has posed numerous unique challenges
to researchers. 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, the challenges and to propose some solutions to secure the WSN
against these security threats. While the set of challenges in sensor networks are
diverse, this paper focus only on the challenges related to the security of Wireless
Sensor Network. This paper begins by introducing the concept of Wireless Sensor
Network (WSN). The introductory section gives brief information on the WSN
components and its architecture. Then it deals with some of the major security
issues over wireless sensor networks (WSNs). This paper also proposes some of
the security goal for Wireless Sensor Network. Further, as security being vital to
the acceptance and use of sensor networks for many applications; I have made an
in depth threat analysis of Wireless Sensor Network. Lastly it proposes some
security mechanisms against these threats in Wireless Sensor Network.

Keywords- Challenges, Issues, Security, Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) 1.

INTRODUCTION

O
NE of fundamental goals for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is to collect
information from the physical world. Comparing to existing infrastructure – based
networks, wireless sensor networks can virtually work in any environment, especially
those where wired connections are not possible. WSNs are often deployed to sense,
process and disseminate information of targeted physical environments.
860 Vikash Kumar et al
 In general, WSNs consist of battery-operated sensor devices with computing, data
processing, and communicating components. The ways the sensors are deployed can
either be in a controlled environment where monitoring and surveillance are critical or in
an uncontrolled environment. In the uncontrolled environments, security for sensor
networks becomes extremely important. This paper is outlined as follows. Section I
provides the introduction to WSN and also covers the basic components and architecture
of WSN. Section II describes various security threats of WSN. Section III describes the
security challenges in implementing WSN. Section IV provides goals of security in WSN.
Section V describes some security mechanism against these security threats. Section VI
provides the conclusion of highlighted issues.

1.1 WSN Architecture

In a typical WSN we see following network components –
Sensor nodes (Field devices) – Each sensor network node has typically several
parts: a radio transceiver with an internal antenna or connection to an external antenna, a
microcontroller, an electronic circuit for .
a) Interfacing with the sensors and an energy source, usually a battery or an embedded
form of energy harvesting.
b) Gateway or Access points – A Gateway enables communication between Host
application and field devices.
c) Network manager – A Network Manager is responsible for configuration of the
network, scheduling communication between devices (i.e., configuring super frames),
management of the routing tables and monitoring and reporting the health of the
network.
d) Security manager – The Security Manager is responsible for the generation, storage,
and management of keys.

The base stations are one or more distinguished components of the WSN with much
more computational, energy and communication resources. They act as a gateway
between sensor nodes and the end user as they typically forward data from the WSN on to
a server. Other special components in routing based networks are routers, designed to
compute, calculate and distribute the routing tables. Many techniques are used to connect
to the outside world including mobile phone networks, satellite phones, radio modems,
high power Wi-Fi links etc. Figure 1-1 shows the architecture of WSN.
Wireless Sensor Networks: Security Issues, Challenges and Solutions 861
2 Security Threats And Issues In WSN
Wireless Sensor Networks are vulnerable to security attacks due to the broadcast nature of
the transmission medium. Basically attacks are broadly classified in two categories i.e.
active attacks and passive attacks. This paper points out both of these attacks in details.

2.1 Passive Attacks

The monitoring and listening of the communication channel by unauthorized attackers are
known as passive attack. Some of the more common attacks against sensor privacy are:

2.1.1 Monitor and Eavesdropping:

This is the most common attack to privacy. By snooping to the data, the adversary could
easily discover the communication contents.

2.1.2 Traffic Analysis:

Even when the messages transferred are encrypted, it still leaves a high possibility
analysis of the communication patterns. Sensor activities can potentially reveal enough
information to enable an adversary to cause malicious harm to the sensor network.

2.1.3 Camouflage Adversaries:

One can insert their node or compromise the nodes to hide in the sensor network. After
that these nodes can copy as a normal node to attract the packets, then misroute the
packets, conducting the privacy analysis.
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2.2 Active Attacks

The unauthorized attackers monitors, listens to and modifies the data stream in the
communication channel are known as active attack. The following attacks are active in
nature.

2.2.1 Routing Attacks in Sensor Networks:

The attacks which act on the network layer are called routing attacks. The following are
the attacks that happen while routing the messages.

2.2.1.1 Attacks on Information in transit:

In a sense or network, sensors monitor the changes of specific parameters or values and
report to the sink according to the requirement. While sending the report, the information
in transit may be altered, spoofed, replayed again or vanished. As wireless
communication is vulnerable to eavesdropping, any attacker can monitor the traffic flow
and get into action to Interrupt, intercept, modify or fabricate packets thus, provide wrong
information to the base stations or sinks.

2.2.1.2 Selective Forwarding:

A malicious node can selectively drop only certain packets. Especially effective if
combined with an attack that gathers much traffic via the node. In sensor networks it is
assumed that nodes faithfully forward received messages. But some compromised node
might refuse to forward packets, however neighbors might start using another route.

2.2.1.3 Black hole/Sinkhole Attack:

In this attack, a malicious node acts as a black hole to attract all the traffic in the sensor
network. In fact, this attack can affect even the nodes those are considerably far from the
base stations. Figure 2-1 shows the conceptual view of a black hole/sinkhole attack.

Figure 2-1: Conceptual view of Black hole Attack

Wireless Sensor Networks: Security Issues, Challenges and Solutions 863

2.1.1.1 Wormholes Attacks:

Wormhole attack is a critical attack in which the attacker records the packets (or bits) at
one location in the network and tunnels those to another location.
 (a) (b)

Figure 2-2: Wormhole Attack

Figure 2-2 (a and b) shows a situation where a wormhole attack takes place. When a
node B (for example, the base station or any other sensor) broadcasts the routing request
packet, the attacker receives this packet and replays it in its neighborhood. Each
neighboring node receiving this replayed packet will consider itself to be in the range of
Node B, and will mark this node as its parent. Hence, even if the victim nodes are multi-
hop apart from B, attacker in this case convinces them that B is only a single hop away
from them, thus creates a wormhole.

2.2.1.4 HELLO flood attacks:

An attacker sends or replays a routing protocol’s HELLO packets from one node to
another with more energy. This attack uses HELLO packets as a weapon to convince the
sensors in WSN.

2.2.2 Denial of Services:

Denial of Service (DoS) is produced by the unintentional failure of nodes or malicious
action. In wireless sensor networks, several types of DoS attacks in different layers might
be performed.

2.2.3 Node Subversion:

Capture of a node may reveal its information including disclosure of cryptographic keys
and thus compromise the whole sensor network. A particular sensor might be captured,
and information (key) stored on it might be obtained by an adversary.

2.2.4 Node Malfunction:

A malfunctioning node will generate inaccurate data that could expose the integrity of
sensor network especially if it is a data-aggregating node such as a cluster leader.
864 Vikash Kumar et al

2.2.5 Node Outage:

Node outage is the situation that occurs when a node stops its function. In the case where
a cluster leader stops functioning, the sensor network protocols should be robust enough
to mitigate the effects of node outages by providing an alternate route.

2.2.6 Physical Attacks:

Unlike many other attacks mentioned above, physical attacks destroy sensors
permanently, so the losses are irreversible. For instance, attackers can extract
cryptographic secrets, tamper with the associated circuitry, modify programming in the
sensors, or replace them with malicious sensors under the control of the attacker.

2.2.7 Message Corruption:

Any modification of the content of a message by an attacker compromises its integrity.
2.2.8 False Node:
A false node involves the addition of a node by an adversary and causes the injection of
malicious data. An intruder might add a node to the system that feeds false data or
prevents the passage of true data. Insertion of malicious node is one of the most
dangerous attacks that can occur.

2.2.9 Node Replication Attacks:

Conceptually, a node replication attack is quite simple; an attacker seeks to add a node to
an existing sensor network by copying the node ID of an existing sensor node. A node
replicated in this approach can severely disrupt a sensor network’s performance. Packets
can be corrupted or even misrouted.

2.2.10 Passive Information Gathering:

An adversary with powerful resources can collect information from the sensor networks if
it is not encrypted. To minimize the threats of passive information gathering, strong
encryption techniques needs to be used.

3 Security Challenges In Wsn

The nature of large, ad-hoc, wireless sensor networks presents significant challenges in
designing security schemes. A wireless sensor network is a special network which has
many constraint compared to a traditional computer network.

3.1 Wireless Medium

The wireless medium is inherently less secure because its broadcast nature makes
eavesdropping simple. Any transmission can easily be intercepted, altered, or replayed by
an adversary. The wireless medium allows an attacker to easily intercept valid packets
and easily inject malicious ones. Although this problem is not unique to sensor networks,
traditional solutions must be adapted to efficiently execute on sensor networks.
Wireless Sensor Networks: Security Issues, Challenges and Solutions 865

3.2 Ad-Hoc Deployment:

The ad-hoc nature of sensor networks means no structure can be statically defined. Nodes
may be deployed by airdrop, so nothing is known of the topology prior to deployment.
Since nodes may fail or be replaced the network must support self configuration. Security
schemes must be able to operate within this dynamic environment.

3.3 Hostile Environment

The next challenging factor is the hostile environment in which sensor nodes function.
Motes face the possibility of destruction or capture by attackers. The highly hostile
environment represents a serious challenge for security researchers.

3.4 Immense Scale

The proposed scale of sensor networks poses a significant challenge for security
mechanisms. Simply networking tens to hundreds of thousands of nodes has proven to be
a substantial task.

4 Security Goals For Sensor Networks

The security goals are classified as primary and secondary. The primary goals are known
as Standard security goals such as Confidentiality, Integrity, authentication and
Availability (CIAA). The secondary goals are Data Freshness, Self Organization, Time
Synchronization and Secure Localization.

4.1 Primary Goals

4.1.1 Data Confidentiality:
Confidentiality is the ability to conceal messages from a passive attacker so that any
message communicated via the sensor network remains confidential. This is the most
important issue in network security. A sensor node should not reveal its data to the
neighbors.

4.1.2 Data Authentication:

Authentication ensures the reliability of the message by identifying its origin.

4.1.3 Data Integrity:

Data Integrity in sensor networks is needed to ensure the reliability of data and refers to
the ability to confirm that the message has not been tempered with, altered or changed.
Even if the network has confidentiality measures there is still a possibility that the data
integrity has been compromised by alterations. The integrity of the network will be in
trouble when:
∙ A malicious node present in the network injects false data.
∙ Unstable conditions due to wireless channel cause damage or loss of data.

4.1.4 Data Availability:

Availability determines whether a node has the ability to use the resources and
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whether the network is available for the messages to communicate. However, failure of
the base station or cluster leader’s availability will eventually threaten the entire sensor
network. Thus availability is of primary importance for maintaining an operational
network.

4.2 Secondary Goals

4.2.1 Data Freshness:
Even if Data Confidentiality and Data Integrity are assured, there is a need to ensure the
freshness of each message. Informally, data freshness suggests that the data is recent, and
it ensures that no old messages have been replayed. To solve this problem a nonce or
another time-related counter, can be added into the packet to ensure data freshness.

4.2.2 Self Organization:

A wireless sensor network is typically an ad-hoc network, which requires every sensor
node be independent and flexible enough to be self-organizing and self-healing according
to different situations. There is no fixed infra-structure available for the purpose of
network management in a sensor network. This inherent feature brings a great challenge
to wireless sensor network security. If self-organization is lacking in a sensor network, the
damage resulting from an attack or even the risky environment may be devastating.

4.2.3 Time Synchronization:

Most sensor network applications rely on some form of time synchronization. Sensors
may wish to compute the end to end delay of a packet as it travels between two pair wise
sensors. A more collaborative sensor network may require group synchronization for
tracking applications.

4.2.4 Secure Localization

Often, the utility of a sensor network will rely on its ability to accurately automatically
locate each sensor in the network. A sensor network designed to locate faults will need
accurate location information in order to pin point the location of a fault. Unfortunately,
an attacker can easily manipulate non-secured location information by reporting false
signal strengths, replaying signals.

5 Security Mechanisms In Wsn

The security mechanisms are actually used to detect, prevent and recover from the
security attacks. A wide variety of security schemes can be invented to counter malicious
attacks and these can be categorized as high-level and low-level.

5.1 Low-Level Mechanism

Low-level security primitives for securing sensor networks include:
Wireless Sensor Networks: Security Issues, Challenges and Solutions 867

5.1.1 Key Establishment and Trust Setup:

The primary requirement of setting up the sensor network is the establishment of
cryptographic keys. Generally the sensor devices have limited computational power and
the public key cryptographic primitives are too expensive to follow. Key establishment
techniques need to scale to networks with hundreds or thousands of nodes.

5.1.2 Secrecy and Authentication:

Most of the sensor network applications require protection against eavesdropping,
injection, and modification of packets. The earliest sensor networks are likely to use link
layer cryptography, because this approach provides the greatest ease of deployment
among currently available network cryptographic approaches.

5.1.3 Privacy:
Like other traditional networks, the sensor networks have also force privacy concerns.
Initially the sensor networks are deployed for legitimate purpose might subsequently be
used in unanticipated ways. Providing awareness of the presence of sensor nodes and data
acquisition is particularly important.

5.1.4 Robustness to Communication Denial of Service:

An adversary attempts to disrupt the network’s operation

5.1.5 Secure routing:

Routing and data forwarding is a crucial service for enabling communication in sensor
networks. Unfortunately, current routing protocols suffer from many security
vulnerabilities.
6 Conclusion
Security in Wireless Sensor Network is vital to the acceptance and use of sensor
networks. In particular, Wireless Sensor Network product in industry will not get
acceptance unless there is a full proof security to the network. This paper summarizes the
attacks and their classifications in wireless sensor networks and also an attempt has been
made to explore the security mechanism widely used to handle those attacks. The
challenges of Wireless Sensor Networks are also briefly discussed.

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