A Survey on Security Attacks in Wireless Sensor

Networks

Published in: Computing for Sustainable Global Development (INDIACom), 2016 3rd International Conference on Date of Conference: 16-18 March 2016 Date Added to IEEE Xplore: 31 October 2016

Muhammad Farooq HussainC# 01

The greatest innovation in the field of telecommunication

is Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN's). In today's world WSN's become the research area due to huge number of application taking the advantage from it. Application of WSN includes, habitat monitoring, security surveillance and home entry system. This presentation will give some idea about the fundamentals, challenges and security goals in WSN's and also the different types of attacks in WSN due to which data is lost or insecure from third parties and also consumes energy of nodes. Finally concluded that it helps to readers to have better view on Wireless Sensor Networks.

Introduction• In past few years,WSN have become increasingly one

of the most interesting research area overhead. • A typical WSN consists of a large number of small

sized inexpensive nodes that integrates computing, sensing and wireless communication proficiency .

• In WSN security and privacy are the enormous challenges

Types

Underwater wireless sensor network Space-based wireless sensor network Wireless underground sensor network

Elements of WSN

Node: Autonomous sensor-equipped device .Data gatherer: Data capturer (also connected to

external system) & a gateway to external system.

External system: Data storing and managing centers, works on those values which is provided by both the node and data gatherer

Field devices: Field device is also known as Sensor motes and the devices are mounted in the process and must be capable of routing packets on behalf of other devices

Gateway: A Gateway enables communication between Host application and field devices. Therefore it is called as Access points.

Network manager: A Network Manager is responsible for configuration of the network, scheduling communication between devices (i.e., configuring ), management of the routing tables and monitoring and reporting the health of the network.

Security manager: The Security Manager is responsible for the generation, storage, and management of keys.

Main Aspects

• Obstacles to WSN security.• Requirements of a Secure WSN.• Attacks.• Defensive Measures.

Network Security Fundamentals

• Confidentiality: means that security mechanism must ensure that only intended receiver can correctly intercept a message and unauthorized access and usage can’t be done

• Integrity : an unauthorized individual is not to be able to destroy the information, when a message is transfer from the sender to the receiver

• Availability : an interruption shouldn’t occur, when a system and application are performing their tasks

Challenges of security in WSNs• Remote Location: most of the WSN’s are operated in

remoted area locations are very far away from our reach, b/c of this, they are left unattended.

• Lack of central control: There is always a central point of control in sensor networks because of their scale and network dynamics.

• Error Prone communications: there are variety of reasons, that includes errors are situated in channel, failure of router and collisions, packets in WSN may be lost or corrupted.

• Resource constraint : traditional security mechanism that have very high overheads, for this resource constrained WSN’s are not suitable

Security Attacks in WSN’s• Two categories : Active attacks & passive attacks• In passive attacks the realization of this attack is easy

and difficult to detect . Traffic analysis, traffic monitoring are the various examples of passive attack

• In active attacks an attacker tries to romve or modify the message which are transmitted on the network. Jaming, DOS, message replay are the examples

Attacks

• Vulnerable to a multitude of attacks such as DoS, traffic analysis, privacy violation, physical attacks and so on.

• DoS: Jamming a node or set of nodes by transmission of a radio signal that interferes with radio frequencies being used.

• Violate the communication protocol thus depleting valuable battery life.

More attacks

• Sybil attack: – Sybil attack is a huge destructive attack in sensor

network, in this attack, a sensor nodes behaves as if it were a large number of nodes, by faking other nodes

– Originally used against peer to peer networks but may also be used to disrupt routing algorithms, data aggregation etc.

• Traffic Analysis Attacks: Take over the base station/nodes closest to base station.

More attacks• Wormhole attack:– In wormhole attack attackers records a packet at one

location in the network and send them to another location and replays it there.

• DOS attack: In DOS attack, an attacker tries to make service or

system inaccessible .• Jamming : A well known attack, it disturb the radio channel

by sending useless information on the frequency band use. Jamming can be temporary or permanent.

Defensive Measures

• Key Establishment.• Secure Broadcasting and Multicasting.• More efficient routing protocols.• Intrusion Detection.

Conclusion and Future Work Networks are shifted from wired to wireless quickly, WSNs is

growing day by day and hot field in the area of research. WSNs are cost effective because it saves the Energy by using low power tiny sensor nodes that makes it popular, with the addition of different other features.WSNs have a variety of features and types that can accommodate many problems arising in different scenarios. The only need is the selection of the right approach on the right place, for getting the maximum benefit from the WSN and its types.

I have a plan to find out an algorithm or mechanism that improves the performance and security issues, of the WSN. My presentation enhances the base for this emerging field and after it, i will pick a particular problem in WSN and work for an efficient approach