Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) use small nodes with constrained capabilities to sense, collect, and disseminate information in many types of applications. As sensor networks become wide-spread, security issues become a central concern, especially in mission-critical tasks. In this paper, we identify the threats and vulnerabilities to WSNs and summarize the defense methods based on the networking protocol layer analysis first. Then we give a holistic overview of security issues. These issues are divided into seven categories: cryptography, key management, attack detections and preventions, secure routing, secure location security, secure data fusion, and other security issues. Along the way we analyze the advantages and disadvantages of current secure schemes in each category. In addition, we also summarize the techniques and methods used in these categories, and point out the open research issues and directions in each area.

/pdf/sensor-network-security-a-survey-2ko4ukoih7.pdf

Sensor network security: a survey

http://romisatriawahono.net/lecture/rm/survey/machine%20learning/Afsar%20-%20Clustering%20in%20Sensor%20Networks%20-%202014.pdf

Clustering in sensor networks

The significant advances of hardware manufacturing technology and the development of efficient software algorithms make technically and economically feasible a network composed of numerous, small, low-cost sensors using wireless communications, that is, a wireless sensor network. WSNs have attracted intensive interest from both academia and industry due to their wide application in civil and military scenarios. In hostile scenarios, it is very important to protect WSNs from malicious attacks. Due to various resource limitations and the salient features of a wireless sensor network, the security design for such networks is significantly challenging. In this article, we present a comprehensive survey of WSN security issues that were investigated by researchers in recent years and that shed light on future directions for WSN security.

Securing wireless sensor networks: a survey

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) constitute one of the most promising third-millennium technologies and have wide range of applications in our surrounding environment. The reason behind the vast adoption of WSNs in various applications is that they have tremendously appealing features, e.g., low production cost, low installation cost, unattended network operation, autonomous and longtime operation. WSNs have started to merge with the Internet of Things (IoT) through the introduction of Internet access capability in sensor nodes and sensing ability in Internet-connected devices. Thereby, the IoT is providing access to huge amount of data, collected by the WSNs, over the Internet. Hence, the security of IoT should start with foremost securing WSNs ahead of the other components. However, owing to the absence of a physical line-of-defense, i.e., there is no dedicated infrastructure such as gateways to watch and observe the flowing information in the network, security of WSNs along with IoT is of a big concern to the scientific community. More specifically, for the application areas in which CIA (confidentiality, integrity, availability) has prime importance, WSNs and emerging IoT technology might constitute an open avenue for the attackers. Besides, recent integration and collaboration of WSNs with IoT will open new challenges and problems in terms of security. Hence, this would be a nightmare for the individuals using these systems as well as the security administrators who are managing those networks. Therefore, a detailed review of security attacks towards WSNs and IoT, along with the techniques for prevention, detection, and mitigation of those attacks are provided in this paper. In this text, attacks are categorized and treated into mainly two parts, most or all types of attacks towards WSNs and IoT are investigated under that umbrella: “Passive Attacks” and “Active Attacks”. Understanding these attacks and their associated defense mechanisms will help paving a secure path towards the proliferation and public acceptance of IoT technology.

/pdf/security-of-the-internet-of-things-vulnerabilities-attacks-5f8nyperis.pdf

Security of the Internet of Things: Vulnerabilities, Attacks, and Countermeasures

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) constitute one of the most promising third-millennium technologies and have a wide range of applications in our surrounding environment. The reason behind the vast adoption of WSNs in various applications is that they have tremendously appealing features, e.g., low production cost, low installation cost, unattended network operation, autonomous and longtime operation. WSNs have started to merge with the Internet of Things (IoT) through the introduction of Internet access capability in sensor nodes and sensing ability in Internet-connected devices. Thereby, the IoT is providing access to huge amount of data, collected by the WSNs, over the Internet. However, owing to the absence of a physical line-of-defense, i.e. there is no dedicated infrastructure such as gateways to watch and observe the flowing information in the network, security of WSNs along with IoT is of a big concern to the scientific community. Besides, recent integration and collaboration of WSNs with IoT will open new challenges and problems in terms of security. Hence, this would be a nightmare for the individuals using these systems as well as the security administrators who are managing those networks. Therefore, a detailed review of security attacks towards WSNs and IoT, along with the techniques for prevention, detection, and mitigation of those attacks are provided in this paper. In this text, attacks are categorized and treated into mainly two parts, most or all types of attacks towards WSNs and IoT are investigated under that umbrella: "Passive Attacks" and "Active Attacks". Understanding these attacks and their associated defense mechanisms will help to pave a secure path towards the proliferation and public acceptance of IoT technology.

Security of the Internet of Things: Vulnerabilities, Attacks and Countermeasures.

In a distributed sensor network, large number of sensors deployed which communicate among themselves to self-organize a wireless ad hoc network. We propose an energy-efficient level-based hierarchical system. We compromise between the energy consumption and shortest path route by utilizing number of neighbors (NBR) of a sensor and its level in the hierarchical clustering. In addition, we design a Secure Routing Protocol for Sensor Networks (SRPSN) to safeguard the data packet passing on the sensor networks under different types of attacks. We build the secure route from the source node to sink node. The sink node is guaranteed to receive correct information using our SRPSN. We also propose a group key management scheme, which contains group communication policies, group membership requirements and an algorithm for generating a distributed group key for secure communication.

A secure hierarchical model for sensor network

A wormhole attack is particularly harmful against routing in sensor networks where an attacker receives packets at one location in the network, tunnels and then replays them at another remote location in the network. A wormhole attack can be easily launched by an attacker without compromising any sensor nodes. Since most of the routing protocols do not have mechanisms to defend the network against wormhole attacks, the route request can be tunneled to the target area by the attacker through wormholes. Thus, the sensor nodes in the target area build the route through the attacker. Later, the attacker can tamper the data, messages, or selectively forward data messages to disrupt the functions of the sensor network. Researchers have used some special hardware such as the directional antenna and the precise synchronized clock to defend the sensor network against wormhole attacks during the neighbor discovery process. In this paper, we propose a Secure Routing protocol against wormhole attacks in sensor networks (SeRWA). SeRWA protocol avoids using any special hardware such as the directional antenna and the precise synchronized clock to detect a wormhole. Moreover, it provides a real secure route against the wormhole attack. Simulation results show that SeRWA protocol only has very small false positives for wormhole detection during the neighbor discovery process (less than 10%). The average energy usage at each node for SeRWA protocol during the neighbor discovery and route discovery is below 25mJ, which is much lower than the available energy (15kJ) at each node. The cost analysis shows that SeRWA protocol only needs small memory usage at each node (below 14kB if each node has 20 neighbors), which is suitable for the sensor network.

SeRWA: A secure routing protocol against wormhole attacks in sensor networks

A black hole attack is a severe attack that can be easily employed against routing in sensor networks. In a black hole attack, a malicious node spuriously announces a short route to the sink node (the destination) to attract additional traffic to the malicious node and then drops them. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical secure routing protocol for detecting and defending against black hole attacks. The proposed protocol uses only symmetric key cryptography to discover a safe route against black hole attacks. The comparison of the proposed protocol with two other existing approaches proves that the proposed scheme is faster in detecting black hole attacks with much lower message overhead.

/pdf/a-hierarchical-secure-routing-protocol-against-black-hole-h10fbd425i.pdf

A hierarchical secure routing protocol against black hole attacks in sensor networks

The Sybil attack is a particularly harmful threat to sensor networks where a single sensor node illegitimately claims multiple identities. A malicious node may generate an arbitrary number of additional node identities using only one physical device. The Sybil attack can disrupt normal functioning of the sensor network, such as the multipath routing, used to explore the multiple disjoint paths between source-destination pairs. But the Sybil attack can disrupt it when a single adversary presents multiple identities, which appear on the multiple paths. Digital certificates are a way to prove identities, but they are not suitable for the sensor network because of the large computational overheads. Researchers have proposed a light-weight identity certificate method to defeat Sybil attacks, but it is not suitable for a large scale sensor network because of the huge memory usage required at each node. In this paper, we propose a light-weight Sybil attack detection method based on a hierarchical architecture in sensor networks. The proposed method can be used in a large scale sensor network, and it only uses the symmetric cryptography avoiding the use of the public key cryptography. Simulation results show that the proposed method only needs a small memory (below 140 KB) for each node (even in a large scale sensor network). In addition, the energy consumption by new identity generations within each group is low (below 60 mJ), which is much lower than the available energy at each sensor node.

Sybil attack detection in a hierarchical sensor network

In this paper, we present an Energy Efficient Secure Routing Protocol for Sensor Networks (ESecRout). The protocol uses the symmetric cryptography to secure messages, and uses a small cache in sensor nodes to record the partial routing path (previous and next nodes) to the destination. It guarantees that the destination will be able to identify and discard the tampered messages and ensure that the messages received are not tampered with. Simulation shows ESecRout's performance comparison with the non-secure routing protocol AODV [1] and the secure routing protocol SAODV [2]. Our protocol needs a little more route discovery overhead (about 8%) and costs a little more energy (about 8%) than AODV, but it performs much better than SAODV which needs much more route discovery overhead (about 33%) and costs much more energy (35%) than AODV. Simulation results also show that the packet delivery ratio and packet latency of AODV, SAODV, and ESecRout are almost the same. Thus, we show that our protocol ESecRout provides energy efficient secure routing.

https://dsn.sagepub.com/content/4/2/67.full.pdf

Jian Yin

Papers

A secure hierarchical model for sensor network

SeRWA: A secure routing protocol against wormhole attacks in sensor networks

A hierarchical secure routing protocol against black hole attacks in sensor networks

Sybil attack detection in a hierarchical sensor network

ESecRout: An Energy Efficient Secure Routing for Sensor Networks