Security Issues for Wireless Sensor Networks

Parag Verma, Ankur Dumka, Anuj Bhardwaj, Navneet Kaur, Alaknanda Ashok, Anil Kumar Bisht, Raksh Pal Singh Gangwar

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000544800
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Cyber Security
• Index: Computer Science

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have attracted high interest over the last few decades in the wireless and mobile computing research community. Applications of WSNs are numerous and growing, including indoor deployment scenarios in the home and office to outdoor deployment in an adversary's territory in a tactical background. However, due to their distributed nature and deployment in remote areas, these networks are vulnerable to numerous security threats that can adversely affect their performance.

This problem is more critical if the network is deployed for some mission-critical applications, such as in a tactical battlefield. Random failure of nodes is also very likely in real-life deployment scenarios. Due to resource constraints in the sensor nodes, a traditional security mechanism with high overhead of computation and communication is not feasible in WSNs. Design and implementation of secure WSNs is, therefore, a particularly challenging task.

This book covers a comprehensive discussion on state-of-the-art security technologies for WSNs. It identifies various possible attacks at different layers of the communication protocol stack in a typical WSN and presents their possible countermeasures. A brief discussion on the future direction of research in WSN security is also included.

1 Introduction to Wireless Sensor Networks

DOI: 10.1201/9781003257608-1

Introduction

There is a need to collect the environmental parameters from a remote location and send the collected data to base station for processing of the data. For this purpose, a wireless sensor network (WSN) is used, which is a network consisting of a number of sensors connected to a base station in order to collect the information of any environmental parameters. A wireless sensor network can be defined as a self-configured and infrastructure-less network that can be used for monitoring different physical and environmental parameters based on the type of usage and applications. Environmental parameters like pressure, temperature, etc. are collected by sensors that are sent from node to node to a mail location, termed a sink node, for observation, processing and analyzing. Thus, sink node acts like an interface between user data and network. The processed data can be collected from sink nodes through queries. Thus, a WSN network consists of hundreds to thousands of nodes connected in a form of network that communicate with each other using radio signals to process any information from a remote location to a base station for processing. The nodes are set using different types of topologies like star, mesh, hybrid, etc., depending upon the type of usage and structure needed.

The work of a WSN is divided into four basic steps:

1. Sensing unit
2. Processing unit
3. Transceiver unit
4. Power unit

The addition of any other unit is based on the type of application and usage.

The sensing unit is used for sensing any environmental parameters that are used to pick data and collect information of interest. This sensor unit is further subdivided into subunits as sensor subunits and analog-to-digital converters. These sensors generate analog signals that are converted into digital signals using an analog-to-digital converter that is fed to a processing unit for processing. The processing unit contains a small memory with a management procedure that carries assigned sensing tasks by coordinating sensing nodes with other sensing nodes. The transceiver is used for sending the information, whereas the power unit consists of power supplies used for providing power to different components.

Issues and Challenges

A wireless sensor network can solve problems based on issues and applications. While implementing a wireless sensor network, there are many issues, which are discussed in this section. One of the prime issues in wireless sensor networks is communication by means of a wireless medium for transferring data within the network. Other issues involve energy consumption using a non-renewable form of energy for data transfer from node to node. Some major issues covered in this section are as follows.

Security: One of the major issues of WSN is security and this issue is covered in this book. The issue of security is also discussed by Zia et al., who divided the security of a WSN into four major pillars: confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and availability. Another issue of security was discussed by Sharma et al., who added one more pillar to the existing structure proposed by Zia. In a WSN, network security is one of the important parameters that is needed in each and every layer of a WSN.

Power Consumption: Power management in a WSN is one of the important issues, as all the nodes of a WSN need power for operation and these nodes depend on a non-renewable source of energy to work. Another issue with nodes of a WSN is the size of the battery, which is small and needs more power. As the process of data compression by these nodes needs energy that require bigger batteries, there is limited energy of the nodes.

Fault Tolerance: Another issue of a WSN is fault tolerance, i.e., failure of nodes, that is due to the fact that nodes of a WSN are frequently being deployed in dangerous and unconditional environment locations like under water, terrain, etc. for the purpose of collecting the data and may cause the hardware failure of these nodes, physical damage of these nodes and also the exhaustion of these nodes.

Latency: Latency in collecting the data from a WSN is also an issue as data is needed from the source node to the base station with minimum delay and latency for which suitable protocols and network topology is required.

Throughput: Throughput or increasing the efficiency of a WSN is always a challenge and an issue, which is an area of research from the past and currently. Since a WSN uses radio and packet transmission as a means for communication from one node to another, and the rate of successful transmission of these data and packets from the source to the destination node should be high, there is a need for efficient and fast transmission.

Data Suppression, Aggregation and Fusion: Data suppression suppresses the data of a WSN to send it from the source node to the destination node, whereas data aggregation is used for combining the data from different nodes and changing that data into meaningful information by reducing the data and removing any redundancy and thus also saves energy. Thus, data suppression, aggregation and fusion minimize the redundancy of data by reducing the load of traffic within the network, which also increases the bandwidth utilization of the network.

Production Cost: The frequent failure of sensor nodes may lead to a heavy cost of a WSN. The sensor node cost should be kept in mind before deploying nodes in a WSN.

Scalability: A number of sensors are used in a WSN and, in order to have high resolution of data, the node density varies from place to place. There are many protocols used for retrieval of data to be scalable and it also maintains adequate performance of the system as per the scalability of the network.

Topology: Selection of topology based on the type of applications and requirements is necessary for an efficient WSN, which is required for saving energy consumption in a WSN. Maintenance of topology is also an important aspect that needs to be addressed in view of reducing the consumption of energy within a WSN.

Transmission Media: For transmission of data from one node to another, radio communication is used over popular Industry, Scientific and Medical (ISM) bands. There are some WSNs that might use optical-based communication or infrared-based communication, so selection of a transmission medium in such a case is of utmost importance.

Architecture for WSNs

A WSN uses a five-layered network architecture of an open systems interconnection (OSI) reference model (Table 1.1).

Table 1.1 Layered architecture of wireless sensor network

Application Layer

Transport Layer

Network Layer

Data Link Layer

Physical Layer

The five layers of a WSN are controlled by means of three cross layers for working efficiently. These three layers are power management, connection/mobility management and task management layers.

Application Layer: The application layer is the topmost layer of WSN architecture that involves the concept of management of traffic, providing software for different applications. These applications send queries for obtaining the information of the system.

Transport Layer: The transport layer is responsible for internetwork communication. This layer uses multiple protocols for providing reliability to the system and avoiding the congestion within the network. A WSN uses node-to-node communication and hence it does not use a TCP-based connection for the transmission of data. It uses a user datagram protocol (UDP) connection for node-to-node transmission within a WSN.

Network Layer: The network layer of a WSN deals with routing protocols that are responsible for parameters like power consumption, reliability, memory and redundancy factors, etc. Routing protocols can be classified into three factors: flat routing; hierarchical routing; and event driven, query-driven or time-driven based upon the type of applications or deployment. Routing protocols can also use the data aggregation concept for providing redundancy within a WSN in order to provide redundancy and save energy. Data fusion can also be used for aggregation of data, which also removes noise from aggregated data.

Data Link Layer: The data link layer is used to provide reliability of data from point to point to multipoint. The data link layer is also used for error control and multiplexing of data. This layer supports a media access control (MAC) address, which is a hardware address of nodes. This layer is used to provide higher reliability, low delay, higher efficiency and throughput.

Physical Layer: The physical layer of a WSN is used as an interface for transmission of a data stream over a physical medium. The physical layer also supports the frequency of data transmission, including parameters like frequency, generation of carrier frequency for modulation, signal detection and security, etc.

Types of Sensors

The heart of a wireless sensor network is the type of sensors we are using and that is based on the type of applications we are using for these sensors. The individual nodes of the wireless sensor network are often termed Motes. These sensors can broadly be divided into three groups as follows:

1. Microelectromechanical system (MEMS): T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1 Introduction to Wireless Sensor Networks
• 2 Security in Wireless Sensor Networks – Background
• 3 QoS as a Means of Providing WSN Security
• 4 The Security Framework for Wireless Sensor Networks
• 5 Secure Key Management Scheme (SKMS)
• 6 Secure Routing Algorithms (SRAs) in Sensor Networks
• 7 Secure Localization Technique (SLT)
• 8 Malicious Node Detection Mechanisms
• 9 The Distributed Signature Scheme (DSS) Based on RSA
• Index