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Wireless Sensor Network

This document discusses wireless sensor networks, including their architecture, security requirements, threats, and countermeasures. It describes the basic components of a sensor node and challenges in wireless sensor networks. Some key security requirements are resource confidentiality, integrity, freshness, self-organization, authentication, and authorization. Security threats include jamming, tampering, collisions, and spoofing at the physical and link layers, and black holes, wormholes, and flooding at the network, transport, and higher layers. Proposed countermeasures are key management to establish secure keys among nodes and intrusion detection systems to monitor networks for malicious activity.

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Serin V Simpson
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52 views13 pages

Wireless Sensor Network

This document discusses wireless sensor networks, including their architecture, security requirements, threats, and countermeasures. It describes the basic components of a sensor node and challenges in wireless sensor networks. Some key security requirements are resource confidentiality, integrity, freshness, self-organization, authentication, and authorization. Security threats include jamming, tampering, collisions, and spoofing at the physical and link layers, and black holes, wormholes, and flooding at the network, transport, and higher layers. Proposed countermeasures are key management to establish secure keys among nodes and intrusion detection systems to monitor networks for malicious activity.

Uploaded by

Serin V Simpson
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PPT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Wireless Sensor Networks – Architecture,

Security Requirements, Security Threats


and its Countermeasures

By Ranjit Panigrahi

National Skills Authority &


Department of Computer Science &
Engineering, Sikkim Manipal Institute of
Technology, Majitar
Introduction
 WSN is a special kind of Adhoc wireless network
equipped with the sensors to sense the environment.
 Challenges involves
 Hardware issues and Operating System
 Characteristics related to wireless radio communication
 Medium access schemes
 Deployment
 Localization
 Synchronization
 Data aggregation and dissemination
 Quality of Service
 Security.
Architecture of Sensor Network

Figure 1: The components of a sensor node (Source: [1]).


Security Requirements
 Resource Confidentiality- A WSN node should not
leak information about the sensed signal at any cost
 Resource Integrity – The transmitted data / Data
received by a node should not be altered
 Resource Freshness – Data received by a node need to
fresh or recent.
 Self Organization – All the sensor nodes must be self
organized in nature.
 Node Authentication - Data which is intended for the
destination must be delivered to the destination only
 Node Authorization - The receiver should receives the
data of genuine senders.
Security Threats and related issues
 Physical Layer
 Jamming - The attacker’s radio frequency interferes with the
radio frequencies of stable nodes.
 Tampering - An attacker can extract sensitive information
such as cryptographic keys or other data on the node.

 Link Layer
 Collision - Intentionally creating collisions in specific
packets such as ACK control messages.
 Exhaustion - Creating repeated collisions by an attacker to
cause exhaustion of resources [8].
Security Threats and related issues
 Network and Routing Layer
 Spoofing altered and Replayed routing information - For
disrupting traffic in the network an attacker may spoof, alter,
or replay routing information.
 Selective forwarding - An attacker node during data
transmission foreword specific packets and drop others. For
example
 Black hole - Where the attacker drops all the packets that it
receives
 Sinkhole - The malicious node behave that it is the best node
and having the best path to the destination .
Security Threats and related issues
 Network and Routing Layer
 Sybil - The attacker node has multiple identities in the
network .
 Wormholes - The attackers receive packets at one
location of the network and tunnel them to the other
location of the network.
 Transport Layer
 Flooding - An attacker may repeatedly make new connection
requests until the resources required by each connection are
exhausted or reach a maximum limit.
 Desynchronization - An attacker may repeatedly spoof messages
to an end host, causing missed frames as a result the nodes lost its
synchronization .
Counter measures to various security threats
 Key Management
 Intrusion Detection System
Key Management
 Main goal is to establish a valid key pair among the sensor
nodes so that they can exchange data more securely.
 Most of the key management techniques are impractical in
nature because it claims a lot of overhead.
 Draw backs :
 Most of the key management schemes assume that the
Base Station is trust worthy but which is not always
true.
 Most of the key management schemes are based on
private key cryptography
Intrusion Detection System
 An intrusion can be defined as a set of actions that can
lead to an unauthorized access or alteration of a certain
system.
 The main aim of intrusion detection system is the
identification of intrusions and intruders. It monitors a
host or network for malicious activity.
 Common intrusion detection systems are
 JAM [2] – Monitors DoS Attack (Jamming)
Conclusion
 The rapid application of WSN in today’s world leads to
various attacks and security threats. Therefore, it
becomes necessary to deploy strong security
mechanisms to prevent possible intruders.
 This paper reflects the overview of security in WSN.
Covering the architecture, security requirements,
security threats and attacks possible, and various
mechanisms used to overcome these security issues in
WSN in brief.
 The main solution to WSN security viz., the Key
Management scheme and Intrusion Detection System
(IDS) are highlighted. Summary of various security
schemes are also provided.
References
1. Akyildiz, I.F., et al., “A Survey on Sensor Networks,” IEEE
Communications Magazine, vol. 40, no. 8, Aug. 2002, pp. 102–114.
2. Wood, A.D., Stankovic, J.A., and Son, S.H., “JAM: A Jammed-Area
Mapping Service for Sensor Networks”, 24th IEEE Real-Time
Systems Symposium, RTSS 2003, pp. 286-297
Thank you

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