WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS – ARCHITECTURE, SECURITY REQUIREMENTS, SECURITY THREATS AND ITS COUNTERMEASURES

Jan Zizka (Eds) : CCSIT, SIPP, AISC, PDCTA - 2013
pp. 107–115, 2013. © CS & IT-CSCP 2013 DOI : 10.5121/csit.2013.3611
WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS –
ARCHITECTURE, SECURITY REQUIREMENTS,
SECURITY THREATS AND ITS
COUNTERMEASURES
Ranjit Panigrahi1
, Kalpana Sharma2
, M.K. Ghose
1
Department of Computer Sc. & Engineering, SMIT, Majhitar, Sikkim, India
ranjit.panigrahi@gmail.com
2
kalpanaiitkgp@yahoo.com
3
mkghose@smu.edu.in
ABSTRACT
Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) has a huge range of applications such as battlefield,
surveillance, emergency rescue operation and smart home technology etc. Apart from its
inherent constraints such as limited memory and energy resources, when deployed in hostile
environmental conditions, the sensor nodes are vulnerable to physical capture and other
security constraints. These constraints put security as a major challenge for the researchers in
the field of computer networking. This paper reflects various issues and challenges related to
security of WSN, its security architecture. The paper also provides a discussion on various
security mechanisms deployed in WSN environment to overcome its security threats.
KEYWORDS
Sensor network, security, Denial of Service (DoS), Intrusion Detection System (IDS),
Authentication.
1. INTRODUCTION
In today’s realistic world Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) [1] has become the most popular
communication medium because of its low cost architecture. It is one of the emerging wireless
networks among the various classes of communication net-works such as Cellular Networks,
Adhoc Networks and Mesh Networks. An Adhoc network cannot be considered as a sensor
network because an Adhoc Network uses multi hop radio relaying and is lack of sensors [2].
A Wireless Sensor Network is defined differently by different authors. According to Akkaya and
Younis [3] WSN is a network that consists of small nodes with sensing, computation and
communication capabilities. Akylidiz et al.[1] defines WSN as a network consisting of large
number of nodes that are deployed in such a way that they can sense the phenomena. Similarly
according to Gowrishankar et al.[4] WSN is a special class of adhoc wireless network that are
used to provide a wireless communication infrastructure that allows us to instrument, observe and
respond to the phenomena in the natural environment and in our physical and cyber infrastructure.

108 Computer Science & Information Technology (CS & IT)
In short a WSN is a special kind of adhoc wireless network equipped with the sensors to sense the
environment.
Designing a wireless sensor network involves variety of challenges such as hard-ware issues and
Operating System, characteristics related to wireless radio communication, medium access
schemes, deployment, localization, synchronization, calibration, synchronization, data
aggregation and dissemination, Quality of Service and security. Many researchers carried out
many research works on these issues; however security is the most challenging area in WSN
which is yet to be explored extensively.
Since the sensors are usually deployed in open environment they are non trust worthy and hence
prone to various security threats. The common security threats include information disclosure,
message injection, sleep deprivation attack etc [5]. An attacker may capture and compromise a
node and thus be able to control some part or even the whole network exclusively [5]. For
example, in a sleep deprivation attack the intruder makes a node or a set of nodes to remain busy;
so that they waste their energy while carrying out the task for the intruders [6]. This attack
imposes a huge amount of energy consumption upon the sensor nodes and as a result the node
battery becomes exhausted and thus the concerned node stops working. The condition becomes
worst if WSN is deployed in a hostile environment. In addition to this there may be a possibility
of Denial of Service attacks in WSN. Therefore it is required to employ a tight security
mechanism to overcome these security threats. Many security mechanisms are presented by many
authors. Broadly they are either Key Management techniques or Intrusion Detection techniques.
The rest of the paper has been organized as follows: section 2 deals with architecture and
environment of WSN, section 3 reflects the various security requirements related to WSN, section
4 focuses on security threats and the related issues followed by section 5 which deals with the
various security mechanisms and finally the paper is concluded at section 6.
2. ARCHITECTURE OF WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORK
A WSN is a collection of sensor nodes which are deployed in a sensor fields which
collect and route data back to the Base Station. A sensor node can be divided into four
basic parts, viz. the sensing unit, a processing unit, a transceiver unit, and a power unit
[7][8]. Localization is the heart of the routing principle in WSN. The position finding
system helps the sensor node to discover its position in the environment. The power unit
gives the constant power supply to the sensor nodes which is the prime target area of the
intruders.
Figure 1. The components of a sensor node (Source: [7]).

Computer Science & Information Technology (CS & IT) 109
3. SECURITY REQUIREMENTS
The main aim of security aspects of WSN is to protect WSN resources and information. This can
be achieved by fulfilling the following security requirements.
3.1. Resource Confidentiality
Confidentiality is the major concern for achieving security in WSN [8][33]. Resource
confidentiality works on the principle that, “the resource destined for the destination only”. In
other words a WSN node should not leak information about the sensed signal at any cost. While
transmitting data the sensor node must create a secure channel for the destination.
3.2. Resource Integrity
Confidentiality doesn’t mean integrity of data [8]. Although the intruder may not be able to steal
data but it may modify the data in certain cases. As a result the sensor network receives the
modified information. Therefore Data integrity ensures that the received data by a node should
not be altered.
3.3. Resource Freshness
In this requirement a node must ensure that it received the fresh data. Data freshness suggests that
the data is recent, and it ensures that no old messages have been resent [8][33].
3.4. Resource Availability
The sensors and the sensor network itself is a scarce resource. The availability of these resources
is vital [8][33]. The availability of a sensor and sensor network is a tedious, because in a WSN
additional computation consumes more energy. So for a secure WSN these resources must be
available.
3.5. Self Organization
Like adhoc wireless network a WSN need to be self organizing in nature in different
situations[33]. For example in case of a node failure the other stable node must able to identify
the best path to the destination by bypassing the failed node.
3.6. Time Synchronization
Time synchronization is a vital scenario in WSN [33]. During transmission the sensor may off or
on in order to preserve energy. In such a scenario it is very tedious to be synchronized. So the
sensor node must ensure that time synchronization is achieved in such a distributed environment.
3.7. Node Authentication
During data transmission it is prime goal that the data which is intended for the destination must
be delivered to the destination only. In other words, data authentication allows a receiver to verify
that the data really is sent by the claimed sender [8][33]. This can be achieved by introducing a
message authentication code (MAC) of all communicated data [33].

3.8. Node Authorization
Node authorization is another aspect for providing security in a WSN environment [8]. In this
process the receiver on receives the data of genuine senders.
4. SECURITY THREATS AND ITS RELATED ISSUES
The WSN is more vulnerable to various security threats as compared to its counterpart wired
network [9][10][11][12]. It is because the WSN access the open shared channel. The security
threats related to wireless adhoc networks are similar to wireless sensor networks [10][11]. These
security threats along with various security schemes are reflected in various research papers
[10][11][12]. It should be noted that the security schemes and protocols used for adhoc wireless
network can’t applied directly to the WSN, because of the architectural complexity of the sensor
nodes [13]. One of the most challenging security threats in WSN is the Denial of Service (DoS).
This paper mainly focuses of DoS attacks. The various DoS attacks and its related measures are
summarized in Table 1.
Table 1. Various attacks and its security measures. (Source [8])
Attacks and its behaviors Security measures
Jamming - The attacker’s radio frequency
interferes with the radio frequencies of stable
nodes. [8][14]
Enhancing variations of spread-spectrum
communication such as frequency
hopping and code spreading [15].
Implementing Code spreading [8].
Tampering - An attacker can extract sensitive
information such as cryptographic keys or other
data on the node.
Tamper-proofing the node’s physical
package.[8][15]
Collision - Intentionally creating collisions in
specific packets such as ACK control messages.
[8][15]
Implementing error-correcting code [8]
Exhaustion - Creating repeated collisions by an
attacker to cause exhaustion of resources [8].
Applying rate limits to the MAC
admission control so that the network can
ignore excessive requests. Employing
time-division multiplexing where each
node is allotted a time slot in which it can
transmit [8].
Spoofing altered and Replayed routing
information - For disrupting traffic in the
network an attacker may spoof, alter, or replay
routing information.[16]
Appending a message authentication code
at the end of the message. In this way the
receivers can verify whether the messages
have been spoofed or altered.[8][17]
Counters or timestamps can be included
in the messages for defending against
replayed information.[8][17]
Selective forwarding. - An attacker node during
data transmission foreword specific packets and
drop others. For example, Black hole attack
where the attacker drops all the packets that it
receives
Using multiple paths to send data [16][8].
Selecting the malicious node and chose a
path that does not follow the malicious
node.

Sinkhole - The malicious node behave that it is
the best node and having the best path to the
destination [8][9].
Sybil - The attacker node has multiple identities
in the network [8][9].
Wormholes - The attackers receive packets at
one location of the network and tunnel them to
the other location of the network [9].
Hello flood attacks - Using a high power
transmitter the attacker broadcast hello packets
to the surrounding nodes which are practically
far apart from the flooder [9].
Acknowledgement spoofing - Grab the
acknowledgement and provide false information
to those neighboring nodes [8].
Egress filtering, authentication,
monitoring Redundancy, probing,
Authentication, monitoring, redundancy
Authentication, probing Authentication,
packet leashes by using geographic and
temporal information Authentication,
verify the bidirectional link
Authentication [8].
Flooding - An attacker may repeatedly make
new connection requests until the resources
required by each connection are exhausted or
reach a maximum limit. [8]
Desynchronization - An attacker may repeatedly
spoof messages to an end host, causing missed
frames as a result the nodes lost its
synchronization [8].
Client puzzles Authentication [8].
5. COUNTERMEASURES TO THE VARIOUS SECURITY THREATS
The common security measures to deal with the security threats are by implementing
cryptography in WSN. This can be achieved either through public key or private key
cryptography [8][33]. In public key cryptography two mathematically related keys are
maintained, one of which is made public while the other is kept private [8][33]. In this process
data is encrypted with the public key and decrypted only with the private key. The problem with
asymmetric cryptography, in a wireless sensor network, is that it is typically too computationally
intensive for the individual nodes in a sensor network [8]. Thus, this technique is not popular in
WSN family. Alternatively the use of Symmetric key cryptography in WSN reduces
computational complexity. Apart from key management techniques WSN also use Intrusion
Detection as another method to keep WSN family secure from the intruders.
Therefore, the WSN Security is entirely based on the following two concepts
5.1. Key Management
The main goal of Key management technique is to establish a valid key pair among the sensor
nodes so that they can exchange data more securely [8][18][33]. There were many key
management techniques but most of these are impractical in a large network such as pair wise key
distribution scheme because it require larger amount of overhead [8].
Although many key management protocols are proposed but these protocols suffer from the
drawbacks stated below.
• Most of the key management schemes assume that the Base Station is trust worthy [8] but
which is not always true.

• Most of the key management schemes are based on private key cryptography but the
public key management schemes may be extended to support public key cryptography.
5.2. Intrusion Detection System [IDS]
An intrusion can be defined as a set of actions that can lead to an unauthorized access or alteration
of a certain system [32]. The main aim of intrusion detection system is the identification of
intrusions and intruders thus alerting it to the user. It monitors a host or network for malicious
activity [6][32]. Various authors propose various schemes pertaining to intrusion detection in
order avoid possible intruders in terms of filtering injected false information only [6][32]. So
these protocols need to be re defined in order to achieve scalability issues. Table 2 focuses on
various security schemes and the major features that it proposes.
Table 2. Summary of various security schemes for WSN (Source [9])
Security Schemes and
Attacks Deterred
Network
Architecture
Major Features
JAM [19]. DoS Attack
(Jamming)
Traditional wireless
sensor network
Avoidance of jammed region by using
coalesced neighbor nodes
Wormhole based [20]. DoS
Attack (Jamming)
Hybrid sensor
network
Uses wormholes to avoid jamming
Statistical En-Route
Filtering [21]. Information
Spoofing
Large number of
sensors, highly
dense wireless
sensor network
Detects and drops false reports during
forwarding process
Radio Resource Testing,
Random Key Pre-
distribution etc. [22]. Sybil
Attack
sensor network
Uses radio resource, Random key pre-
distribution, Registration procedure,
Position verification and Code
attestation for detecting Sybil entity
Bidirectional Verification,
Multipath multi-base
station routing [23]. Hello
Flood Attack
sensor network
Adopts probabilistic secret sharing,
Uses bidirectional verification and
multi-path multi-base station routing
On Communication
Security [24]. Information
or Data Spoofing
sensor network
Efficient resource management,
Protects the network even if part of the
network is compromised
TIK [25]. Wormhole
Attack, Information or
Data Spoofing
sensor network
Based on symmetric cryptography,
Requires accurate time
synchronization between all
communicating parties, implements
temporal leashes
Random Key
Predistribution [26], [27],
[28]. Data and information
spoofing, Attacks in
information in Transit
sensor network
Provide resilience of the network,
Protect the network even if part of the
network is compromised, Provide
authentication measures for sensor
nodes
REWARD [29]. Black hole
attacks
sensor network
Uses geographic routing, Takes
advantage of the broadcast inter-radio
behavior to watch neighbor
transmissions and detect Black hole
attacks

TinySec [30]. Data and
Information spoofing,
Message Replay Attack
sensor network
Focuses on providing message
authenticity, integrity and
confidentiality, Works in the link layer
SNEP & µTESLA [31].
Data and Information
Spoofing, Message Replay
Attacks
sensor network
Semantic security, Data authentication,
Replay protection, Weak freshness,
Low communication overhead
6. CONCLUSIONS
The rapid application of WSN in today’s world leads to various attacks and security threats [33].
Therefore, it becomes necessary to deploy strong security mechanisms to prevent possible
intruders. This paper reflects the overview of security in WSN. Covering the architecture,
security requirements, security threats and attacks possible, and various mechanisms used to
overcome these security issues in WSN in brief. The main solution to WSN security viz., the Key
Management scheme and Intrusion Detection System (IDS) are highlighted. Summary of various
security schemes are also provided.
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AUTHORS
Mr. Ranjit Panigrahi received his Master degree in Computer Science and Engineering
at Sikkim Manipal University in 2013. He is currently deputed as Assistant Professor in
Department of Computer Sc. & Engineering in Sikkim Manipal Institute of Technology.
His area of interests includes Sensor Network Security, Visual Cryptography and Data
Mining. He is also a certified Microsoft Technology Specialist.
Dr. Kalpana Sharma, Professor of the Department of Computer Science & Engineering
at Sikkim Manipal. Institute of Technology, Majitar, Sikkim, India since August, 1998.
She did her BE from National Institute of Technology, Silchar, India and M.Tech from
IIT Kharagpur, India. She completed her PhD in the field of Wireless Sensor Network
Security. Her areas of research interest are Wireless Sensor Networks, Steganography,
Network & Information Security, Real Time Systems and Software Engineering. She has
published a number of technical papers in various national and international journals in
addition to presentation/ publication in several international/ national conferences.
Prof. (Dr.) M.K.Ghose is currently the Dean (R & D), SMIT and Professor and
Head of the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at Sikkim Manipal
Institute of Technology, Majitar, Sikkim. His areas of research interest are Data
Mining, Simulation & Modeling, Network, Sensor Network, Information Security,
Optimization & Genetic Algorithm, Digital Image processing, Remote Sensing & GIS
and Software Engineering. Dr. Ghose chaired a number of national/international
conference sessions. He has conducted quite a number of Seminars, Workshops and
Training programmes in the above areas.

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