Wireless Sensor Networks: An Overview on Security Issues and Challenges

International Journal of Advanced Engineering, Management and Science (IJAEMS) [Vol-3, Issue-3, Mar- 2017]
https://dx.doi.org/10.24001/ijaems.3.3.10 ISSN: 2454-1311
www.ijaems.com Page | 209
Wireless Sensor Networks: An Overview on
Security Issues and Challenges
Arundhati Nelli, Sushant Mangasuli
Assistant Professor, Dept. of CSE, AIET Mijar, India
Abstract—Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are formed by
deploying as large number of sensor nodes in an area for the
surveillance of generally remote locations. A typical sensor
node is made up of different components to perform the task
of sensing, processing and transmitting data. WSNs are used
for many applications in diverse forms from indoor
deployment to outdoor deployment. The basic requirement of
every application is to use the secured network. Providing
security to the sensor network is a very challenging issue
along with saving its energy. Many security threats may
affect the functioning of these networks. WSNs must be
secured to keep an attacker from hindering the delivery of
sensor information and from forging sensor information as
these networks are build for remote surveillance and
unauthorized changes in the sensed data may lead to wrong
information to the decision makers. This paper gives brief
description about various security issues and security threats
in WSNs.
Keywords—Sensor, Security, Threats, wireless, overview,
Challenges.
I. INTRODUCTION
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are emerging as both an
important new tier in the IT ecosystem and a rich domain of
active research involving hardware and system design,
networking, distributed algorithms, programming models,
data management, security and social factors . The basic idea
of sensor network is to disperse tiny sensing devices; which
are capable of sensing some changes of incidents/parameters
and communicating with other devices, over a specific
geographic area for some specific purposes like target
tracking, surveillance, environmental monitoring etc.
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are the collectors of
information from the physical world in the form of sensed
data according to the requirement like temperature, pressure,
humidity, level, movement etc. This data is available to the
sink through gateway. Sensors are deployed in extensive
numbers and on account of its wireless nature; it is easily
works in any type of environment. Although sensor nodes
are deployed in a random manner still it’s important to
deploy them carefully. Deploying few nodes may raise the
issue of coverage and deploying too many nodes may result
in an inefficient network because of more collision and
interference. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) need
effective security mechanisms because these networks
deployed in hostel unattended environments. Due to inherent
limitations in wireless sensor networks, security is a crucial
issue. While research in WSN security is progressing at
tremendous pace, no comprehensive document lists the
security issues and the threat models which pose unique
threats to the wireless sensor networks.
We identify the security threats, review proposed security
mechanisms for wireless sensor networks. Security in the
Wireless Sensor Networks has various difficulties, some
common are: dynamically changing topology, wireless
communication among the sensor nodes, infrastructure-less
framework, and limited physical resources like energy
source, memory capacity and very low communication
bandwidth . Numerous analysts proposed so many threats
handling models and diverse security protocols for secure
data communication and routing in WSN.
Fig.1: Architecture for WSN
There are many parameters affect selecting the security
mechanism as its speed and energy consumption. The intent

of this paper is to investigate the security related issues and
challenges in wireless sensor networks.
II. WSN SECURITY REQUIREMENTS
A WSN is a sensor node has the limited processing capacity,
a limited storage capacity and limited communication
bandwidth, limited energy and hardware size. There are so
many types of the sensor nodes currently available on
different platforms. The security also matter with the design
of the hardware of sensor nodes in the real life. Sensor
network have to fulfill some requirements for providing a
secure communication. General security requirements of
WSNs are availability, confidentiality, integrity and
authentication. Some other requirements known as secondary
requirements are source localization, self organization and
data freshness. These requirements gives protection against
attacks to the information transmitted over the sensor
network.
Data Confidentiality: In sensor network, data flows from
many intermediate nodes and chance of data leak is more. To
provide the data confidentiality, an encrypted data is used so
that only recipient decrypts the data to its original form.
Data Integrity: Data received by the receiver should not be
altered or modified is Data Integrity. Original data is
changed by intruder or due to harsh environment. The
intruder may change the data according to its need and sends
this new data to the receiver.
Data Authentication: It is the procedure of confirmation
that the communicating node is the one that it claims to be. It
is important for receiver node to do verification that the data
is received from an authenticate node.
Data Availability: Data Availability means that the services
are available all the time even in case of some attacks such as
Denial of service.
Source Localization: For data transmission some
applications use location information of the sink node. It is
important to give security to the location information. Non-
secured data can be controlled by the malicious node by
sending false signal strengths or replaying signals.
Self-Organization: In WSN no fixed infrastructure exists,
hence, every node is independent having properties of
adaptation to the different situations and maintains self
organizing and self healing properties. This is a great
challenge for security in WSN.
Data Freshness: Data freshness means that each message
transmitted over the channel is new and fresh. It guarantees
that the old messages cannot be replayed by any node. This
can be solved by adding some time related counter to check
the freshness of the data.
Scalability: It should sustain a big number of nodes.
Time Synchronization: It should avoid collision and traffic
manipulation.
III. OBSTACLES AND CONSTRAINTS
WSN is a wireless network which has several constraints as
compared to other similar networks. These obstacles and
restrictions make it complex to implement security
techniques in WSNs. Therefore, to develop efficient security
mechanisms it is necessary to know and comprehend and
these obstacles, which are as follows:
Limited Resources: The scarcity of resources makes
implementation of security techniques difficult as they need
a certain amount of resources for operations e.g. data
memory and processing power.
Unreliable Communication: The security of the network
greatly depends upon the defined protocols and
communication medium which is wireless in nature.
Unattended Operation: The sensor nodes may be left
unattended for long periods of time as per the type of
application of the particular WSN which make them more
vulnerable to many attacks.
Due to these obstacles, the nodes and the network experience
many constraints which further effect their overall
functioning. For nodes the constraints are limited energy,
memory, storage space and processing power. On the other
hand due to these obstacles the network becomes untrusted
and unreliable, collision prone and managed remotely with
no or less resiliency.
IV. CATEGORIES OF ATTACKS IN WSNS
The attacks those are effective in WSNs can be categorized
by interruption and communication act in three categories:
A. Outsider Vs Insider attacks: In this WSN, outsider
attacks may be known as external attacks and the insider
attacks known as the internal attacks. An outsider attacks
come from outside the WSN. With the help of Outsider
attack the garbage data is injected in network for the services
interruption if network and a DoS attack is also raise. An
insider attack is also known as the internal attack , these
attacks come from the inside of the WSN, those attacks want
to interrupt the running process in network and also exploits
the network assets.
B. Passive Vs Active Attacks: Passive attack is easier to
realize and not difficult to detect because it does not modify
any information during the interchanged information. After
analyzing the routing information we can make a active
attack.

In active attacks, an attacker has the capability to remove or
modify the messages during the transmission on the network.
C. Mote-class Vs laptop-class attacks : In bit class assaults,
an enemy assaults a WSN by utilizing a couple of hubs with
comparative capacities to the system hubs; in portable PC
class assaults, a foe can utilize all the more capable gadgets
to assault a WSN. These gadgets have more noteworthy
transmission reach, handling force, and vitality saves than
the system hubs. In bit class assaults, an enemy assaults a
WSN by utilizing a couple of hubs with comparable
capacities as that of system hubs. In portable workstation
class assaults, an enemy can utilize all the more capable
gadgets like tablets, thus on and can do substantially more
mischief to a system than a malicious sensor hub.
V. ATTACKS IN WSNS AT DIFFERENT LAYERS
A. Physical Layer: “The first layer is physical layer that
is
responsible for frequency selection, carrier frequency
generation, signal detection, modulation, and data
encryption. As with any radio-based medium, there exists the
possibility of jamming and interferences.”
B. Data Link Layer: The next layer is data link layer that is
in charge for the multiplexing of data streams, data frame
detection, medium access, and error control, and responsible
for point to point & point –to-multipoint relation in the
network.
C. Network and Routing Layer: The third layer is network
and routing layer provide more effective routing the data
from
“Node to node, node to sink, node to base station and node to
Cluster head & vice versa.” Due to the broadcast method
every node works as a router.
D. Transport Layer: “The transport layer is responsible for
managing end-to-end connections. In sensor network
connection this layer is responsible to the communication.
There are three possible attacks in this layer, flooding,
desynchronization and false message injected.
The attacks on different layers and their defense are given in
below table.
Layers Attack types Defense
Transport Layer
Flooding
Desynchronization
False message
injected
Client puzzles,
Rate limitation
authentication
Network and
Routing Layer
Black holes
Sinkholes
Sybil Information
& selective
forwarding
Wormhole
Authentication,
Monitoring,
Redundancy
verification,
packet leashes
by using
geographic and
temporal
information.
Redundancy
Authorization,
monitoring
Egress Filtering
and
authentication
Data Link Layer
Jamming &
Collision,
Exhaustion,
Unfairness
Error correcting
Rate-limit Small
frames
Physical Layer
Jamming
Tempering
Speed Spectrum,
Priority
Messages
Temper –
proofing, hidinn
VI. SECURITY LEVELS
In this paper our overview report has concentrated on
different
parts of sending secure conventions by the late analysts.
Numerous specialists have proposed a wide range of systems
to give security in imprompt remote systems. The use of
these strategies to sensor systems is promising, however the
likelihood of pernicious hubs coercing great hubs and the
trouble in recognizing hub misconduct. All are valuable
building pieces for securing directing conventions in sensor
systems. To accomplish proficient key administration, a few
symmetric key based systems were proposed previously. So
that the study on symmetric key cryptography, as of late,
there
are various studies researching the execution of PKC (Public
Key Cryptography) in sensor networks. Security Mechanism
are at two levels these are high level and low level
mechanism.
(a) High Level Security
(i) SGM (Secure Group Management)
(ii) ID (Intrusion Detection)
(iii) SDA (Secure Data Aggregation)
(b) Low Level Security

(i) Robustness to Communication DoS
(ii) Security Routing
(iii) Resilience to Node Capture
(iv) Key Establishment and trust setup
(v) Security and Authentication
(vi) Privacy
VII. SECURITY PROTOCOLS IN SENSOR
NETWORKS
Cryptography is a basic technique to achieve the security in a
network. This establishes a secure relationship between two
end points. In this, sender encrypts the original data and
receiver decrypts the received data to obtain an original data.
Different types of keys are used in the process of
cryptography.
The various protocols that are proposed by different authors
for solving the security issue in WSN are:
a) SPINs
SPIN (Sensor Protocols for Information via Negotiation)
protocol works in three steps. First, a node advertises the
ADV packet containing the metadata. If the received node is
interested in the data then it sends the request for data using
REQ packet. Finally, the advertiser node after receiving
request sends the DATA packet to the requestor node. It
performs best in small size networks because of its efficiency
and high latency properties. Typical SPIN consists of two
secure building blocks named as μTESLA (Timed Efficient
Stream Loss-tolerant Authentication) and SNEP (Sensor
Network Encryption Protocol). SNEP provides
confidentiality, authentication and integrity. It uses the
concept of encryption. To authenticate the data, MAC
(Message authentication Code) is used. It adds 8 bytes to the
message . To reduce the communication overhead, SNEP
uses a shared counter between sender node and receiver
node. After each block counter gets incremented. Counter
helps in identifying the freshness of data. In TESLA, digital
signatures are used to authenticate the data packet. Sink node
computes a MAC on the packet after receiving the packet
with the secret key to send an authenticated packet back to
source. After receiving a packet, node confirms that the sink
does not disclose the computed MAC key to other nodes.
With this, receiving node assures that data packet is original
and no alterations are done in the packet.
b) LEAP
LEAP (Localized Encryption and Authentication Protocol) is
a protocol with key management scheme that is very
efficient with its security mechanisms used for large scale
distributed sensor networks. It generally supports for inside
network processing such as data aggregation. In-network
processing results in reduction of the energy consumption in
network. To
provide the confidentiality and authentication to the data
packet, LEAP uses multiple keys mechanism. For each node
four keys are used known as individual, pair wise, cluster
and group key. All are symmetric keys and use as follows:
Individual Key: It is the unique key used for the
communication between source node and the sink node.
Pair wise Key: It is shared with another sensor nodes.
Cluster Key: It is used for locally broadcast messages and
shares it between the node and all its surrounding
neighboring nodes.
Group Key: globally shared key used by all the network
Nodes.
These keys can also be used by other non-secured protocols
to
increase the network security. LEAP is satisfies several
security and performance requirements of WSN. LEAP is
used
to defend against HELLO Floods Attack, Sybil Attack and
Wormhole Attack .
c) TINYSEC
TINYSEC is link layer security architecture for WSNs. It is a
lightweight protocol. It supports integrity, confidentiality and
authentication. To achieve confidentiality, encryption is done
by using CBC (Cipher-block chaining) mode with cipher
text
stealing, and authentication is done using CBC-MAC. No
counters are used in TINYSEC. Hence, it doesn’t check the
data freshness. Authorized senders and receivers share a
secret key to compute a MAC. TINYSEC has two different
security options. One is for authenticated and encrypted
messages (TinySec-AE) and another is for authenticated
messages (TinySec-Auth). In TinySec-AE, the data payload
is encrypted and the received data packet is authenticated
with a MAC. In TinySec-Auth mode, the entire packet is
authenticated with a MAC, but on the other hand the data
payload is not encrypted. In CBC, Initialization Vector (IV)
is used to achieve semantic security. Some of the messages
are same with only little variation. In that case IV adds the
variation to the encrypted process. To decrypt the message
receiver must use the IV. IVs are not secret and are included
in the same packet with the encrypted data.

d) ZIGBEE
ZIGBEE is a typical wireless communication technology. It
is used in various applications such as military security,
home automation and environment monitoring. IEEE
802.15.4 is a standard used for ZIGBEE. It supports data
confidentiality and integrity. To implement the security
mechanism ZIGBEE uses 128 bit keys. A trust center is used
in ZIGBEE which authenticates and allows other
devices/nodes to join the network and also distribute the
keys. Generally, ZIGBEE coordinator performs this function.
Three different roles in ZIGBEE are:
Trust Manager: It authenticates the devices which are
requesting to join the network.
Network Manager: It manages the network keys and helps
to maintain and distribute the network keys.
Configuration Manager: It configures the security
mechanism and enables end-to-end security between devices.
VIII. CHALLENGES
WSNs endure many restrictions like little computation
capability,limitedmemory,less energy resources,propensity to
physical capture,and deficient of infrastructure,which make
them open to many security attacks or chaalenges and make
security techniques inevitable and desirable with some
security solutions.All the security mechanisms discussed in
the previous section provide security to WSNs to a certain
level only. There are still remaining many issues and
challenges which need to be addressed and resolved.It has
been deduced that there are still many issues remaining
which need to be addressed to make WSNs secure and
efficient like:
 Public Key cryptography methods require excessive
computation and storage in resources constrained WSN.
 Most of the security techniques are specific to certain
attack which needs to be flexible.
 Key distribution problem need to be addressed to achieve
encrypted and secure communication.
 Key Updating is an open issue.
 Key Revocation is needs to be addressed to prevent the
malicious node from participating in normal
communication
The computational overhead need to be reduced in
resource constraint environment of WSN. The scalability is
also desired to make the WSNs flexible for node addition
and deletion.
IX. CONCLUSION
Wireless Sensor Network has an great significance in all
aspects military and civilian but it needs protection from all
kinds security threats and attacks. Toady’s most of the
offered security mechanisms are based on definite network
model or specific attack as there is no such combined or
general model to make certain overall security. To combine
the different security techniques together to work in
collaboration with each other will lay researchers open to a
tough challenge. It will be also important to notice the
adaptability, cost-effectiveness and energy efficiency to
deploy such schemes in different applications of WSNs.
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