Security Issues in Wireless Sensor Network

Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing, 2020

Information security broadly refers to the state of protection against unsanctioned access to information or data, principally electronic or digital data. In today's world of modern technology, there is a need to design and develop security measures to protect information from various security risks and threats. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) hold significant importance in this era of the technological world; as its wide range of applications are being used around the globe in almost every domain. WSNs are being deployed with several constraints and limitations, due to which deploying security mechanisms on such networks becomes a difficult task for the developers. This research work specifically targeted security issues in WSNs and hence subjected to provide authentication and data encryption in a novel manner for node-to-node communication. The proposed scheme not only provides security for the node to node communication network but also hoards memory space on nodes with the help of Elliptic Curve Digital Signature (ECDSA) cryptographic scheme to provide an appropriate mechanism for measuring key generation time, count of hello message and packet size. Furthermore, the Algorithm for Wireless Secure Communication (ASCW) also provides key management with acceptable key length. In addition to this, ASCW helps in securing the communication on node level which helps in securing the whole network in a better and efficient manner. ASCW also reduces the cost of risk and security threats on the network with the help of authentication mechanism. A physical testbed has designed based on devices and sensor motes according to the required specifications. The proposed solutions have evaluated in terms of key generation time, several hello message and size of data packets. Experimental results have indicated that ASCW is one of the suitable and a novel approach for securing data on nodes during communication in WSNs.

2014

Wireless sensor networks consist of autonomous sensor nodes attached to one or more base stations.As Wireless sensor networks continues to grow,they become vulnerable to attacks and hence the need for effective security mechanisms.Identification of suitable cryptography for wireless sensor networks is an important challenge due to limitation of energy,computation capability and storage resources of the sensor nodes.Symmetric based cryptographic schemes donot scale well when the number of sensor nodes increases.Hence public key based schemes are widely used.We present here two public - key based algorithms, RSA and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and found out that ECC have a significant advantage over RSA as it reduces the computation time and also the amount of data transmitted and stored.

International Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering (IJECE), 2020

Wireless sensor network (WSN) have limited bandwidth, low computational functions, energy constraints. Inspite of these constraints, WSN is useful where communication happens without infrastructure support. The main concern of WSN is the security as the sensor nodes may be attacked and information may be hacked. Security of WSN should have the capability to ensure that the message received was sent by the particular sent node and not modified during transmission. WSN applications require lightweight and strong authentication mechanisms for obtaining data from unprivileged users. In wireless sensor networks, authentication is the effective method to stop unauthorized and undisrupted communication service. In order to strengthen the authenticated communication, several researchers have developed mechanisms. Some of the techniques work with identifying the attacked node or detecting injected bogus message in the network. Encryption and decryption are the popular methods of providing the security. These are based on either public-key or symmetric-key cryptosystems.Many of the existing solutions have limitations in communication and computational expertise. Also, the existing mechanisms lack in providing strength and scalability of the network. In order address these issues; a polynomial based method was introduced in recent days. Key distribution is a significant aspect in key management in WSNs. The simplest method of distribution of key is by hand which was used in the days of couriers. Now a day, most distribution of keys is done automatically. The automatic distribution of keys is essential and convenient in networks that require two parties to transmit their security keys in the same communication medium. In this work, a new type of key exchange mechanism is proposed. The proposed method for authentication among sensor nodes proves to be promising as per the simulation results. The nodes which are unknown to each other setup a private however arbitrary key for the symmetric key cryptosystem.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are an emerging technology with a wide range of potential application areas such as monitoring, tracking and controlling. For several applications of Wireless Sensor Network, security is an important requirement. However, security solutions in Wireless Sensor Network are entirely different compared with traditional networks due to resource limitation and computational constraints. This paper presents the characteristics, security requirements, encryption algorithms and operation modes of Wireless Sensor Network to develop a security solution. Also, an overview of the applications of WSNs and different attacks and their countermeasures are to be discussed.

In the near future wireless sensor networks are expected to become increasingly popular due to their low cost and ease use. As a distributed systems, they are usually deployed in unattended and hostile environment which makes them vulnerability to “man in the middle attack” since the medium they are using could not be restricted. The only way to protect the content from being exposed to the adversary is by using cryptography. Most often the public key and the symmetric key encryption are used. However the cryptographic algorithms are processor and memory demanding. When using wireless sensor networks (WSN) we need to consider the aspects of protecting communication among the nodes. We are investigating the possible attacks and suggest our adaptive holistic approach to secure the network while minimizing the cost.

ArXiv, 2021

Cryptography techniques are essential for a robust and stable security design of a system to mitigate risk of external attacks and thus improve its efficiency. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) play a pivotal role in sensing, monitoring, processing and accumulating raw data to enhance the performance of the actuators, microcontrollers, embedded architectures, IoT devices and computing machines to which they are connected. With so much threat of potential adversaries, it is essential to scale up the security level of WSN without affecting its primary goal of seamless data collection and communication with relay devices. This paper intends to explore the past and ongoing research activities in this domain. An extensive study of these algorithms referred here, are studied and analysed. Based on these findings this paper will illustrate the best possible cryptography algorithms which will be most suited to implement the security aspect of the WSN and protect it from any threat and reduce ...

2018

A wireless network consisting multiple (ranging from a few hundreds to thousands) nodes which are sparsely dispersed and have dedicated sensors for monitoring, recording, detecting environment and gathering environmental data (e.g. light, sound, temperature, pressure, wind speed, directions, motion, etc.) is usually known as a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). These nodes are self-organizing and are not controlled by a central administrator. The wide adoption and deployment rate of WSN is as a result of the processing power, wireless communication and the sensing technology that the WSN possesses. The numerous advantages this network holds has led to its growth. As the deployment and acceptability of WSN increases, the vulnerability to attacks is increasing hence the need for effective security mechanisms. Encryption has proven to be a reliable way of data protection hence its adoption in the improvement of the security level in WSNs. Identifying suitable encryption mechanism for WSNs ...

The future developments of the wireless sensor networks and its applications demands for the efficient and secure communication. For the solution of efficient and reliable security needs cryptography algorithms provides good solutions. For providing reliable security schemes mainly data confidentiality now-a-days key management is used. This paper provides a review over cryptography schemes being used to deal with security issues of wireless sensor networks.

Computer Science & Engineering: An International Journal, 2012

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consists of small nodes with constrained capabilities to sense, collect, and disseminate information in many types of applications. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have attracted significant interests from the research community in a wide range of applications such as target tracking, environment monitoring, military sensing, distributed measurement of seismic activity, and so on.As sensor networks become widespread , security issues become a central concern. In this paper, we identify the Security requirements of key management in WSN. The secure management of the keys is one of the most critical elements when integrating cryptographic functions into a system. An outline of hybrid cryptography, one way hash and Key infection schemes are discussed in this paper. Along the way we analyze the advantages and disadvantages of current secure schemes. Finally, we aim to provide the different techniques of efficient key management operations for secure communications in WSN.

2012

This paper discusses different issues of Wireless S ensor Network (WS N) and the relevance of the Elliptic curve y cryptography. S ecurity in WS N is a greater challenge in WS N due to the processing limitations of sensor nodes and nature of wireless links. Extensive use of WS Ns is giving rise to different types of threats. To defend against the threats proper security schemes are required. Traditionally security is implemented through hardware or software and is generally achieved through cryptographic methods. Limited area, nature of links, limited processing, power and memory of WS Ns leads to strict constraints on the selection of cryptographic techniques. Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is the best candidate due to its smaller key size. High security despite of smaller key size results in area and power efficient crypto systems.