Review of Security Issues in Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks

Int. J. Advanced Networking and Applications
Volume: 07 Issue: 05 Pages: 2887-2892 (2016) ISSN: 0975-0290
2887
Review of Security Issues in Mobile Wireless
Sensor Networks
Aarti Singh1
Associate Professor, Maharishi Markandeshwar University, Mullana
Email: singh2208@gmail.com
Kavita Gupta2
Research Scholar, Maharishi Markandeshwar University, Mullana
Email: kavita_mittal25@yahoo.co.in
-------------------------------------------------------------------ABSTRACT---------------------------------------------------------------
MWSNs are finding applicability in wide range of applications. Applications spread from day to day utilities to
military and surveillance, where they may sense information about vehicular movements around border.
Considering the importance of data being sent by these nodes, threat of compromising them has also increased.
This paper aims to explore various types of attacks and tries to classify them based on some common parameter.
Better understanding of various attacks, their style of functioning and point of penetration can help researchers
devise better preventive measures.
Keywords: Attacker, MWSN, security attacks, security prerequisites
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Date of submission: March 02, 2016 Date of Acceptance: March 28, 2016
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1. Introduction
Mobile Wireless Sensor Network is a collection of
tiny sensor nodes having mobile nature [1]. These
sensor nodes have limited amount of memory and
limited energy source associated with them. Being
cheap and easily deployable they are finding utility in
military applications and also surveillance in public
sectors. Sensors can sense and report change is values
of various parameters such as temperature, pressure,
vehicular movement and presence or absence of light or
some other objects. They are generally deployed in
hostile environments to sense sensitive information,
which can’t be collected otherwise. Like other wireless
adhoc networks, MWSNs are also prone to security
risks, however existence of a base station makes it
feasible to apply security measures in this case.
Although limited computational ability associated with
these mobile wireless sensor nodes makes it difficult to
deploy strong security systems inside them.
MWSNs are prone to two types of attacks in terms of
security, first can be attack on the communicated data
which takes place through routing process and second
can be attack on security mechanism being adopted.
Sensor nodes sense and transmit information to base
station which may be captured by some intruder in the
medium and may be modified or deleted. Considering
the importance of data being sensed it becomes
essential to develop robust security measures for
communication in MWSNs. Thus, security in sensor
networks is defined as protecting sensed data from
unauthorized access in order to modify or delete it
before being received by the intended recipient. This
paper aims to explore various dimensions of security in
MWSNs such as need of security, various types of
attacks possible on these networks and preventive
measures existing in literature.
This paper gives the overview of various security
attacks; section 2 presents need of security in MWSN,
section 3 describes the threat model and its
assumptions, Section 4provides overview of security
attacks at various layers of routing protocols, Section 5
concludes the paper.
2. Security Prerequisites
Considering the applicability of MWSNs in sensitive
applications, security of data being sensed becomes
very important. Following are the reasons for having
strong security in MWSNs: Figure 1. given below
presents the various security perquisites.
2.1 Data Confidentiality: Confidentiality of data is
the major concern in case of wireless transmission.
Data encryption is the widely accepted technique
for maintaining confidentiality. Data should be
encrypted in such a way that it should be read or
understood by intended recipients [5].
2.2 Data Integration: Data integration aims to ensure
that there is no change in data being sent by the
sender and contents reach unaltered and with any
loss to its destination. Various methods may be
applied at MAC layer for ensuring the reliability of
data [5].

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2.3 Authenticity of Nodes: Authenticity helps to
ensure the receiver that information being received
has originated from intended sender.
Authentications in sensor networks ensure the
origin of data packets and also prevent the
alteration of data packets by the attackers [6].Node
authentication is required in hierarchical networks
where nodes are organized in form of clusters. In
clustered networks nodes join the respective
clusters as per their sensing capabilities or many
other attributes.
2.4 Availability: Availability ensures that all the
resources are available for all the nodes and
network enables the transmission of data. It also
ensures that all the resources can be used at any
time as per requirements even if any internal or
external attack is there. In the field of MWSN there
exist various types of risk that can results in loss of
availability of resources and they also effect the
real time applications [5].
2.5 Self-Organization: As nodes in sensor network are
of mobile nature, thus they may organize
themselves to form a network. This self-organizing
capability helps MWSNs to survive and work in
hostile environments; however it raises security
[18] challenges. Since dynamic change in network
topology and introduction of new participants in
networks dilutes security [19] measures to some
extent.
2.6 Freshness: Freshness of data implies that fresh
copy of data is forwarded. It also ensures that data
is not copied and no duplicate data packet is there
in the network that prevent the data from various
types of attacks like replay attack, select &
forwarding attack.
Next section elaborates the threat model for MWSNs,
which covers all possible types of attacks in these
networks.
3. Threat Model
Threat model classifies attacks based on location,
damage level, style of attack or devices used for attack.
Following is the description for these classifications.
3.1 Classification of attacks based on location of
attacker
Attacker may attack the sensor nodes by entering into
the network or staying out of the network. Based on its
location, attacks may be classified as either insider or
outsider attacks.
3.1.1 Insider or Internal attack Handling insider
attack is really difficult in MWSNs. Attacker may steal
the identity of other nodes and may change routes of
data transmission. While inside the network, attacker
may cause following harms:
 Consumes the energy of other sensor nodes: it
may get energy of other nodes wasted by sending them
false data requests.
Security
Perequistites
Authenticity
of data
Data
Confidentiality
Data
Integration
Availability
Freshness
Localization of
data
Self
Organization
Fig. 1 Security Prerequisites

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 Causes Topology change: attacker may
pretend like the neighboring node for the victim and
may persuade others to change their data transmission
paths.
 Accessing of nodes is easy [8,9]: being inside the
network it is really easy for the attacker to pretend like
a participating node or more than one participating
nodes. It may easily access data transfers taking place
and may behave like sink node to get all data directed
to it.
3.1.2 Outsider or External attack
In outsider attack, attacker may be sitting anywhere
outside the MWSN. It is also a major threat since it is
difficult to locate the attacker, while it may keep on
damaging the network [8,9,10].
3.2 Classification of attacks based on damage level
This classification focuses attacks based on the extent
of damage caused by them to the network and extent of
penetration in the network. On this basis attacks can be
categorized as active and passive attacks:
3.2.1 Active Attacks
The attacks which perform some type of operation in
the network such as
 Faulty data intrusion
 Packet Modification
 Radio frequency Overlapping
 Data alteration
3.2.2 Passive Attacks
This type of attack includes the following
 Attacker looks like a normal node
 Access the encrypted information
 Degrade the network performance
 Avoids cooperation
3.3 Classification of attacks based on their
functionality
Based on their functionality attacks may be classified
into three types, attacks on secrecy of data, attacks on
availability of nodes, attacks on the network:
3.3.1 Attacks on secrecy of data
 Packet spoofing,
 Eavesdropping
 False Data Intrusion
3.3.2 Attack on availability of nodes
Denial of service attacks [15,16] fall in this category
which degrades the network’s performance and disrupts
the mobile wireless sensor network’s services.
3.3.3 Attack on the network
These type of attacks affect the routing communication
channel and partially degrades the mobile wireless
sensor network’s services and functionality.
3.4 Classification of attacks based on attacking
device
Different types of devices are used by attackers for
degrading the MWSNs performance and these devices
have different types of radio antenna, power source and
performance capabilities. Based on type of devices
used, attacks are of two types:
3.4.1 Mote Class Attacker
In this type of attack, attacker use internal nodes for
attacking the network and these nodes may or may not
have properties as that of ordinary sensor nodes.
[11,12].
3.4.2 Laptop Class Attacker
In this type of attack, attacker use external powerful
source for attacking. That external source can be a
laptop or any other communication device. It can
disturb or even corrupt the entire network and also
affects the radio frequency and bandwidth of
communication channel.
Not only there are various types of attacks, but also the
attacks focus on different layer of communication
protocols for their propagation. Next section
summarizes attacks on different layers of
communication protocols.
4. Security Attacks at Various Layers of
Routing Protocol
Sensor network architecture usually adopts OSI
reference model for communication. But out of seven
layer following five layers are used by sensor network
[20].
4.1 Attacks at Physical Layer
At physical layer, encryption of transmitted data takes
place. Thus attacks working on this layer focus on
unauthorized decryption of data or try to damage it.
Some such attacks are described below
Data Integrity& Confidentiality
Data is transferred in the form of bits and fixed no of
bits are integrated to form data packet. These attacks
access the encrypted information and may degrade the
network performance.
4.1.1 Eavesdropping attack
In this process an attacker may gather the information
from network in unauthorized way i.e. secretly
snooping the information and encrypted data such as
node ids and password information for further use.
4.1.2 Jamming
In this attack multiple data packets are sent over the
same frequency range to exhaust the frequency. It may
also reduce the inter arrival time between the data
packets to flood the recipients. Such attacks will lead to

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confusion in data packets and wastage of resources of
sensor nodes.
4.1.3 Tampering
Physical access of node by attacker is known as
tampering. By tempering a node attacker can extract the
cryptographic key or other data from the node.
4.2 Attacks at Data Link layer Attack
4.2.1 Collision Attack
In this attack multiple data packets are transmitted over
the same frequency that can cause change in data within
packets and checksum error at receiving end [5]. This
attack occurs due to environmental effects and due to
probabilistic collision.
4.2.2 Unfairness
In this attack data is not equally distributed among all
data frames i.e. data packets doesn’t contain same no of
bits, leading to non-cooperation among sensor nodes.
4.3 Attacks at Network Layer
4.3.1 Replay Attack
In this attack data packets are retransmitted either by
source or by intruder [17] on the route. There
intruder/attacker captures a data packet and resend it to
destination or to host in repeated manner so as to waste
its resources like energy and buffer capacity.
4.3.2 Select & Forwarding Attack
In this attack some data packets are stopped in between
and few of data packets are forwarded to base station.
This may cause the loss of data packets and reduce the
efficiency of the network.
4.3.3 Spoofing Attack
In this attack, attacker creates the routing loops and
gives wrong routing information.
4.3.4 Wormhole Attack
In this attack, attacker collects all packets at one point
and then start sending the copy of same packet with
high speed so that duplicate packets may reach to
destination before the original packets and drains the
energy of sink node unnecessarily [7].
4.4 Attacks at Transport Layer
4.4.1 Flooding Attack
In this attack attacker send large number of data packets
over the network towards base station or to access point
to increase confusion at receiving end. Wrong routing
information is also floated by the attacker.
4.4.2 De-Synchronization
In this attack attacker affects the end to end delivery of
data packets by flashing a forges message between
terminals.
4.4.3 Sybil Attack
In this attack a node claims multiple identities under the
influence of attacker and that results in
miscommunication about address of node. Thus packets
meant for some other node are delivered to dummy
node.
4.5 Attacks at Application Layer
4.5.1 Sinkhole Attack
As this attack works on the top layer of the routing
protocol [12], in this attack, attacker placed itself in
between data packets and base station, attract all the
data packets traffic towards it. Attacker gives the
perception that it is the shortest route for data
transmission and in turn may corrupt the data packets.

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Table 1 given below provides summery of various attacks at each layer of communication protocol along with their
possible effects.
Table 1 Attack at Various Layers of Communication Protocol
Layer Attack Effects of attack
Physical
Layer
 Denial of Service(DoS)
 Jamming
 Tampering
 Data Integration
 Data Confidentiality
 False Data Intrusion
 Change of Data in Packets
 Multiple data packets sent on same radio frequency create
congestion
Data Link
Layer
 Collision attack
 Unfairness
 Data loss
 Data may be delivered at wrong address
Network
Layer
 Replay Attack
 Select & Forwarding
 Wormhole Attack
 Spoofing Attack
 Increased Network traffic
 Looping in rou1111ting can increase time of packet
delivery
 Duplication of data packets
 Wrong routing information
Transport
Layer
 De synchronization Attack
 Flooding Attack
 Sybil Attack
 Data delivery is not reliable
 Destination may have multiple copy of data
 Creates Confusion on routing path
Application
Layer
 Sinkhole Attack  Unreliable communication
5 Conclusion
Security is crucial for MWSNs. Since these networks
operate in hostile unattended environments they are
easy targets for intruders. Deployment of these
networks in hostile environments is due to importance
of data available there. Thus security of sensor nodes
and sensor networks becomes essential for maintaining
the integrity of information captured through them. This
work has explored various types of attacks possible for
MWSNs along with essentials of security mechanisms.
Mobility feature in sensor nodes further increases
security threats and requires still better mechanisms to
be developed for these networks. Future work aims to
present a security mechanism for MWSNs.
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