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Wireless Sensor Network Security

Research Proposal · January 2017

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.16684.87682

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Research Plan for Master/Doctoral Degree Program

Research title

Security in Wireless Sensor Networks/ Study Case

Surname：Djibril
First name: Djamila

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Contents

Research Plan for Master/Doctoral Degree Program .............................................. 1

Abstract: .................................................................................................................. 3

This thesis explores security ................................................................................... 3

Introduction: ............................................................................................................ 3

Wireless communication ......................................................................................... 3

Research Background:............................................................................................. 5

Since we may have so many definitions ................................................................. 5

Research Purpose: ................................................................................................... 7

The first goal of the thesis is ................................................................................... 7

Literature Review .................................................................................................... 8

Security Overview ................................................................................................... 8

WSN Security Attacks:............................................................................................ 9

Protection of wireless networks means ................................................................... 9

Conclusions: .......................................................................................................... 14

In the research work it is ....................................................................................... 14

References: ............................................................................................................ 14

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Abstract:
This thesis explores security issues in wireless sensor networks security (WSNs), it is vital that
the Sensor network technologies involved become sufficiently mature and robust against
Malicious attack to be trustworthy. The inclusion of wireless communication technology also
incurs various types of security threats. The intent of this paper is to investigate the security
related issues, the challenges and to propose some solutions to secure the WSN against these
security threats. While the set of challenges in sensor networks are diverse, this paper focus
only on the challenges related to the security of Wireless Sensor Network. This paper begins by
introducing the concept of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). The introductory section gives
brief information on the WSN components and its architecture. Then it deals with some of the
major security issues over wireless sensor networks (WSNs). This paper also proposes some of
the security goal for Wireless Sensor Network. Further, as security being vital to the acceptance
and use of sensor networks for many applications; I have made an in depth threat analysis of
Wireless Sensor Network. Lastly it proposes some security mechanisms against these threats in
Wireless Sensor Network.

Introduction:
Wireless communication is the transfer of information between two or more points that are not
connected by electrical conductors. Most of the wireless communication technology uses radio waves in
order to transfer information between the points which are known as nodes. One application domain of
wireless communication is wireless sensor networks. WSN is a distributed system, containing resource or
constrained nodes that work in an ad hoc manner using multi-hope communication, WSNs and Internet are
integrated as a new application area called Internet of Things (IOT), covering almost every area in current
daily life .
IOT encourages several novel and existing applications such as environment monitoring, infrastructure
management, public safety, medical and health care, home and office security, transportation, and military
Applications. Figure 1-1 shows the complexity of wireless sensor networks, which translate sensing and
identification activities into services using WSNs with WSN middleware and access networking. It can use:
(i) different communication platforms such as Wi-Fi, wireless LAN, 3G and 4G; (ii) different devices which
are based on different processors such as various types of PDA, smart phones and laptops and (iii) all these
platforms and devices being built on different architectures such as centralized, distributed or peer-to-peer.
WSNs provide unprecedented ability to identify, observe and understand large- scale, real-world phenomena
at a fine spatial-temporal resolution. The applications range from military to daily life. For example, in
community services WSNs can (1) provide early warnings for natural disasters such as floods, hurricanes,
droughts, earthquakes, epidemics; (2) disseminate surveillance information for cities in parks, hotels, forests,
to support municipality service delivery; and (3) provide enjoyment of the city by citizens and tourists
through public services support such as monitoring of water quality to ensure that citizens always have clean
water or providing free environmental information on the main tourist destinations. In general, the network
consists of a data acquisition network and a data distribution network, monitored and controlled by a
management center.
.

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 Figure1-1
Wireless sensor networks are quickly gaining popularity due to the fact That they are potentially
low cost solutions to a variety of real-world challenges their low cost provides a means to
deploy large sensor arrays in a variety of conditions capable of performing both military and
civilian tasks. But sensor networks also introduce severe resource constraints duet their lack of
data storage and power. Both of these represent major obstacles to the implementation of
traditional computer security techniques in a wireless sensor network as it shown in Figure 1-2.
The unreliable communication channel and unattended operation make the security defenses
even harder. Indeed, as pointed out in, wireless sensors often have the processing
characteristics of machines that are decades old (or longer), and the industrial trend is to reduce
the cost of wireless sensors while maintaining similar computing power. With that in mind,
many researchers have begun to address the challenges of maximizing the processing
capabilities and energy reserves of wireless sensor nodes while also securing them against
attackers. All aspects of the wireless sensor network are being examined including secure and
efficient In addition to those traditional security issues; we observe that many general-purpose
sensor network techniques (particularly the early research) assumed that all nodes are
cooperative and trustworthy. This is not the case for most, or much of, real-world wireless
sensor networking applications, which require a certain amount of trust in the application in
order to

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 Figure 1-2
Maintain proper network functionality. Researchers therefore began focusing on building a
sensor trust model to solve the problems beyond the capability of cryptographic security
In addition, there are many attacks designed to exploit the unreliable communication channels
And unattended operation of wireless sensor networks. Furthermore, due to the inherent
unattended feature of wireless sensor networks, we argue that physical attacks to sensors play
an important role in the operation of wireless sensor networks. Thus, we include a detailed
discussion of the physical Attacks and their corresponding defenses topics typically ignored in
most of the current research on sensor security. We classify the main aspects of wireless sensor
network security we also give a brief introduction of related security techniques, while
providing appropriate citations for those interested in a more detailed Discussion of a particular
topic.

Research Background:
Since we may have so many definitions of the pertinent question is security, hence we can say
that the Things go wrong, but why do they go wrong? Some say this is due to the lack of knowledge
about the problem or the logical failure of systems. Moreover this is the vast field in and needs
closer study which we can discuss and so this paragraph/section surveys the purpose of the
problematic studies. The need for security has existed since the dawn of time. There has always
been a need to protect physical assets from the unauthorized entities. Protection and safety of goods
or people have driven the need for fortifications. Below the papers gives the thesis related works on
security technology. Y. Zhang and W. Lee [Zhang2000] in their paper, ―Intrusion detection in
Wireless ad-hoc Networks, the authors discuss a statistical anomaly detection approach for mobile
ad hoc networks. So far, the authors concentrate on simulations at the routing protocol level, but in
they have not mentioned about multi-layer integrated intrusion detection would be helpful to
increase detection rate. On the application layer, they suggest to use statistical analysis of service
parameters, such as service time or service request rate. However, due to the continuously changing
topology within VANETs, a statistical anomaly detection approach (especially on the routing level)
seems not to be applicable, since it is very difficult to study normal behavior in training phases
which will later on differ from an attack. Seung Yi, Prasad Naldurg, Robin Kravets, [Seung2001] in
their paper, ―Security-Aware Ad-Hoc Routing for Wireless Networks‖ the author discussed they
present an example scenario where finding a route with special security attributes or trust levels is
more relevant than finding the shortest route or any route between two nodes. They focus on a
high-risk ad hoc network; wireless communication devices in a battle field, where malicious
adversaries can intercept and alter mission critical information. Robert J. Boncella [Robert2002] in

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their paper, ―Wireless Security: An Overview‖ the author states that - The physical transport
methods used in wireless communication differ from wired communication. These differences
affect to establish that how a secure channel can be established in a wireless environment. The
purpose of this tutorial is to provide an overview of how a secure channel is set up in a wireless
environment that uses the 802.11 or WAP standards. And the paper gives study and information
about the security spectrum and states the Security problems prevented widespread adoption of
802.11. These problems are related to the design of WEP currently the industry is working to solve
these problems. It is developing solutions based on the 802.1x specification. The specification is
based on the Internet Engineering Task Force‘s (IETF) Extensible Authentication Protocol.
Yi Lu, Wiechao Wang, Yuhui Zhong [Wiechao 2003] in their paper, ―Secure Wireless networks with
movable base station‖ the author discussed the WANET and WLAN and proposed the Hierarchical Mobile
Wireless networks(HMWN) for supporting the movable base stations. In such system a secure packets
forwarding algorithms and an authentication and key exchanged protocols are deployed to protect the
networks infrastructure. Golle, P. Greene and D.H. Staddon [Golle 2004] in their paper, ―Detecting and
correcting malicious data in VANETs‖ the authors stated that - In order to meet performance goals, it is
widely agreed that vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) must rely heavily on node-to-node communication,
thus allowing for malicious data traffic. At the same time, the easy access to information afforded by
VANETs potentially enables the difficult security goal of data validation. And they proposed a general
approach to evaluating the validity of VANET data. In their approach a node searches for possible
explanations for the data it has collected based on the fact that malicious nodes may be present. Explanations
that are consistent with the node's model of the VANET are scored and the node accepts the data as dictated
by the highest scoring explanations. Our techniques for generating and scoring explanations rely on two
assumptions: first; nodes can tell ―at least some‖ other nodes apart from one another and second; a
parsimony argument accurately reflect adversarial behavior in a VANET, they justify both assumptions and
demonstrate our approach on specific VANETs. Rouba El Kaissi, Ayman Kayssi, Ali Chehab and Zaher
Dawy [Rouba2005] in their paper, ―DAWWSEN: A Defense Mechanism against Wormhole Attacks in
Wireless Sensor Networks‖, the author presented and proposed a defense mechanism against wormhole
attacks in wireless sensor networks. Specifically, a simple routing tree protocol is proposed and shown to be
effective in defending against wormhole attacks through ns-2 simulations. And also they discovered a new
protocol called DAWWSEN that incorporates a detection and defense mechanism against the wormhole
attack, a powerful attack that has serious consequences on sensor routing protocols. A great advantage of
DAWWSEN is that it doesn‘t require any geographical information about the sensor nodes, and doesn‘t take
the time stamp of the packet as an approach for detecting a wormhole attack, which is very important for the
resource constrained nature of the sensor nodes. Hyung Woo Lee, Choong Seon Hong [Hyung 2006],
Al-Sakib Khan Pathan in their paper, ―Security in Wireless Sensor Networks: Issues and Challenges‖ the
authors cited that - Most of the attacks against security in wireless sensor networks are caused by the
insertion of false information by the compromised nodes within the network. For defending the inclusion of
false reports by compromised nodes, a medium or mode is required for detecting false reports. However,
developing such a detection mechanism and making it efficient represents a great research challenge. Again,
ensuring holistic security in wireless sensor network is a major research issue. Many of today‘s proposed
security schemes are based on specific network models. As there is a lack of combined effort to take a
common model to ensure security for each layer, in future though the security mechanisms become
well-established for each individual layer, combining all the mechanisms together for making them work in
collaboration with each other will incur a hard research challenge. Even if holistic security could be ensured

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for wireless sensor networks, the cost-effectiveness and 58 energy efficiency to employ such mechanisms
could still pose great research challenge in the coming days.

Research Purpose:
The first goal of the thesis is WSNs are special kind of ad-hoc network. Security
Services in WSNs are required to protect the information and resources from attacks and misbehaviour.
Security goals are classified as primary and secondary. The primary goals are known as standard security
goals such as confidentiality, integrity, authentication and availability (CIAA). The secondary goals are Data
freshness, Self-organization, Time-synchronization and Secure Localization
The questionnaire requires information about:
Why Need Security? Why Security Complicated in WSN?
What are the security threats on wireless sensor network? And the types these threats?
What are the security requirements? And how the technology growth affects the wireless sensor network
security?
What is the available method that is used until today? And what is Issues with High-Level Security
Mechanisms?

Data Confidentiality: Confidentiality is the ability to conceal messages from a passive attacker so that any
message communicated via the sensor network remains confidential It ensures that a given message cannot
be understood by anyone other than the desired recipients. This is the most important issue in network
security. For secure communication, encryption is used. Data is encrypted with a secret key that only
authorized users have. Public sensor information should also be encrypted to some degree to protect against
traffic analysis attacks
Data Authentication: Authentication ensures the reliability of the message by identifying its origin. Attacks
in sensor networks do not just involve the alteration of packets; adversaries can also inject additional false
packets sensors. A more collaborative sensor network may require group synchronization for tracking
applications
Secure Localization: In WSN each sensor node is required to locate itself in the network accurately and
Automatically to identify the location of the fault
Data integrity: Data integrity in sensor networks is needed to ensure the reliability of the data and refers to
the availability who confirm that a message has not been tempered with, altered or changed.
The Secondary goals are:
Data Freshness: Freshness implies that the data is recent and ensures that no adversary can replay old
Messages Data freshness is classified in two types based on the message ordering: weak and strong freshness.
Weak freshness provides only partial message ordering but gives no information related to the delay and
latency of the message. Strong freshness on the other hand gives complete request-response pair and allows
the delay estimation.
Self –Organization: A wireless sensor network is a typically an Ad-hoc network, which requires every
Sensor node be independent and flexible enough to b self-organizing and self- healing according to different
Situation.
Time-Synchronization: Most sensor network applications relay on some form of time-synchronization.
Furthermore, sensors may wish to compute the end-to-end delay of a packet as it travels between two pair
wise

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Literature Review

Security Overview
Security is a key consideration in contemporary network environments. Early in the
Development of the Internet, protocols implicitly assumed a trusted and altruistic User base
who would never attempt to snoop on routed track and pick up plaintext Passwords, forge a
sender address on an incoming email message, or attempt to Subvert name services or end hosts.
When a network or inter-network serves a single Organization, or small group of academic
organizations with a common purpose and Interest and united by a common ethic, this may be a
workable assumption; when the Network is extended into the physical world, including users
with rivalrous ideologies And interests, such assumptions become questionable .Although there
may not be rivalry amongst the intended users of a WSN system (Those responsible for
deployment are usually the end users or an agent for them), there is sample opportunity for
external attackers to interfere with track sent over inherently insecure multi hop channels. In
wired networks, external attackers would be required to compromise physical channels, which
is likely to reveal their presence. For example, splicing a backbone cable involves visible
attachments and potentially Traceable impacts upon channel properties and reception. However,
in a WSN, the Deployment region is frequently sparsely populated and any arbitrary external
device with a transceiver is able to access the wireless channel. This creates vulnerability
To malicious attack by external entities, and consequently a risk to system security.the low-cost
nodes envisaged for future deployment (frequently operate using 8-bit microcontrollers.
The KirtiRaj Bhatele, et al presented hybrid security protocol for better security using a
combination of both symmetric and asymmetric cryptographic algorithms. In this hash value of
the decrypted message using AES algorithm is calculated using MD5 algorithm. This hash
value has been encrypted with dual RSA and the encrypted message of this hash value also sent
to destination. Now at the receiving end, hash value of decrypted plaintext is calculated with
MD5 and then it is compared with the hash value of original plaintext which is calculated at the
sending end for its integrity. By this we are able to know whether the original text being altered
or not during transmission in the communication medium.
Arash Habibi Lashkari, et al., presented a survey on wireless security protocols (WEP, WPA
and WPA2/802.11i). Here WEP protocol types, weaknesses and enhancements, WPA protocol
types, WPA improvements such as cryptographic message integrity code or MIC, new IV
sequencing discipline, per packet key mixing function and rekeying mechanism. They also
explained major problems on WPA that happened on PSK part of algorithm. Finally paper
explained third generation of wireless security protocol as WPA2/802.11i.
Gamal Selim, et al., explained various types of security attacks modification, fabrication,
interception, brute force, maintainability and static placement of MIC. They surveyed currently
available security protocols i.e. WEP, WEP2, WPA and WPA2. They also proposed a new
mechanism called multiple slot system (MSS). MSS makes use of the key selector, slot selector
and MIC shuffle selector. MSS uses one of four encryption algorithm RC4, RSA, Blowfish and
AES.
Hyung-Woo Lee, et al., explained various issues and challenges in wireless sensor network.
Paper explained two types of wireless security attacks – one is the attack against the security
mechanisms and another is against the basic mechanisms like routing mechanism. Major

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attacks explained are denial of service attack, attacks on information in transit, sybil attack,
hello flood attack, wormhole attack, black hole/sinkhole attack. Paper also explained the
various security schemes for wireless sensor networks like wormhole based, statistical en-route
filtering, random key and tiny sec. Holistic view of security in wireless sensor networks is also
described.
Lifeng Sang, et al., proposed shared secret free security infrastructure for wireless networks
based on two physical primitives: cooperative jamming and spatial signal enforcement.
Cooperative jamming is for confidential wireless communication and spatial signal
enforcement is for message authenticity. Proposed infrastructure provides confidentiality,
identity authentication, message authentication, integrity, sender non-repudiation, receiver non
repudiation and anonymity.
Andrew Gin, et al., compared the performance analysis of evolving wireless 802.11 security
architecture. Paper explained wireless network security methods. Paper explained security
layers like WEP shared key authentication and 40 bit encryption, WEP shared key
authentication and 104 bit encryption, WPA with PSK authentication and RC4 encryption, WPA
with EAP-TLS authentication and RC4 encryption, WPA2 with PSK authentication and AES
encryption and WPA2 with EAP-TLS authentication and AES encryption. Effects on
throughput are also discussed.
Floriano De Rango et. al., proposed static and dynamic 4 - way handshake solutions to avoid
denial of service attack in WPA and IEEE 802.11i. Paper also explained DoS and DoS flooding
attacks against IEEE 802.11i 4-way handshake. Paper also compared static versus dynamic
resource oriented solutions for the 4 way handshake.
Stephen Michell, et al., proposed state based key hope protocol (SBKH) that provides a
lightweight encryption scheme for battery operated devices such as the sensors in a wireless
sensor network as well as small office, home office (SOHO) users. State based key hope
protocol implements encryption in a novel state based way so as to provide cheap and robust
security without additional overheads of encryption. Implementation of SBKH on real
hardware is a challenge.

WSN Security Attacks:

Protection of wireless networks means protection from attacks on confidentiality, integrity and
availability. Possible threats come from vulnerabilities in the security protocols. This section
explains various types of security attack techniques. These techniques can be applied to violate
both confidentiality and integrity or only confidentiality and only integrity. Different types of
security attacks are shown in the Figure 1-3.

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Traffic analysis: This technique enables the attacker to have the access to three types of
information. The first type of information is related to identification of activities on the network.
The second type of information important to the attacker is identification and physical location
of access point in its surroundings. The third type of information an attacker can get by traffic
analysis is information about the communication protocol. An attacker needs to gather the
information about the size and number of the package over a certain period of time.
Eavesdropping: In case of eavesdropping attacker secretly listens to the private conversation
of others without their permission. Eavesdropping attacks include passive eavesdropping,
active eavesdropping with partially known plaintext and active eavesdropping with known
plaintext.
Denial of Service (DoS): An attacker tampers with the data before it is communicated to the
sensor node. It causes denial of service attack due to wrong or misleading information.
Jamming is one of DoS attack on network availability. It is performed by malicious attackers
who use other wireless devices to disable the communications of users in a legitimate wireless
network.
Physical layer: Attacks at the physical layer include jamming and Tampering. These two
attacks are discussed in the subsections.
1) Jamming:
Jamming is a type of attack which interferes with the radiofrequencies that a network’s nodes
are using. An attack resends some radio waves at the same frequency that it is
Used by WSNs Jamming can be of two types constant jamming and intermittent jamming.
Constant jamming affects the complete obstruct of the whole network whereas in intermittent
jamming nodes are capable of communicating data periodically but not Continuously. A
jamming source may either be powerful enough to disrupt the entire network or less powerful
and only able to disrupt a smaller portion of the network.

Figure 1-4: Radio Jamming in WSN

[www.google.com/patents/us7907888]

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2) Tampering:
Another physical layer attack is tampering. Given physical access to a node, an attacker can
extract sensitive information such as cryptographic keys or other data on
the node. The node may also be altered or replaced to create a compromised node which the
attacker controls

Figure 1-5: Tampering Attack ‘

Attacks against Privacy:

Sensor network technology promises a vast increase in automatic data collection capabilities
through efficient deployment of tiny sensor devices. While these technologies offer great
benefits to users, they also exhibit significant potential for abuse. Particularly relevant concerns
are privacy problems, since sensor networks provide increased data collection
capabilities .Adversaries can use even seemingly innocuous data to derive sensitive information
If they know how to correlate multiple sensor inputs. For example, in the famous “panda-hunter
problem”, the hunter can imply the position of pandas by monitoring the traffic .The main
privacy problem, however, is not that sensor networks enable the collection of information. In
fact, much information from sensor network could probably be collected through direct site
surveillance. Rather, sensor networks aggravate the privacy problem because they make large
Volumes of information easily available through remote access. Hence, ad- versaries need not
be physically present to maintain surveillance. They can gather information in a low-risk,
anonymous manner. Remote access also allows a single adversary to monitor multiple sites
simultaneously .Some of the more common attacks, against sensor privacy are:
• Monitor and Eavesdropping this is the most obvious attack to privacy. By listening to the data,
the adversary could easily discover the communication contents. When the traffic conveys the
control information about the sensor network configuration, which contains potentially more
detailed information than accessible through the location server, the eavesdropping can act
effectively against the privacy protection.
• Traffic Analysis Traffic analysis typically combines with monitoring and eavesdropping. An
increase in the number of transmitted packets between certain nodes could signal that a specific
sensor has registered activity. Through the analysis on the traffic, some sensors with special
roles or activities can be effectively identified.
• Camouflage Adversaries can insert their node or compromise the nodes to hide in the sensor
network. After that these nodes can masquerades a normal node to attract the packets, then
misroute the packets, e.g. forward the packets to the nodes conducting the privacy
Analysis.

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Wormhole attack:
Wormhole attack is a critical attack in which the attacker records packets at one location in the
network and tunnels those to another location. The tunneling or retransmitting
Of bits could be done selectively .A wormhole is a low-latency junction between two sections
of network. The malicious node receives packets in one section of the network and sends them
to another section of the network. These packets are then replayed locally. This creates a fake
scenario that the original sender is only one or two nodes away from the remote location. This
may cause congestion and retransmission of packets squandering the energy of innocent nodes.

Figure1-6: Wormhole Attack

Research Methods:
Security Requirements:
While any organization wants to protect its sensitive data, to detect tampering of data and to
limit access to authorized individuals, various industries must also comply with an array of
regulatory and industry requirements and guidelines. One common requirement is that sensitive
data that is stored or communicated over public networks must be encrypted using certified
algorithms. Another common requirement is for users to authenticate themselves using
two‐authentication, generally achieved by a combination of something the user possesses such
as a security token (e.g., USB dongle or security smart card), and something the user knows
(e.g., password). Biometric approaches can also be used as one of the authentication factors.
Regulations are becoming more stringent, both at the state and federal level. Organizations
designing new mobile‐access solutions need to plan accordingly to ensure they comply with
both current and future requirements.
The WEP was designed to provide the security of a wired LAN by encryption through use of
the RC4 algorithm with two side of a data communication. The working of the WEP can be
understood with the help of sender side encryption and receiver side decryption
Key Establishment:
One security aspect that receives a great deal of attention in wireless sensor
Network is the area of key management. Wireless sensor networks are unique (among other
embedded wireless networks) in this aspect due to their size, mobility and computational/power
constraints. Indeed, researchers envision wireless sensor networks to be orders of magnitude
larger than their traditional embedded counter parts .This coupled with the operational
constraints described previously, makes secure key management an absolute necessity in most
wireless sensor network designs. Because encryption and key management/establishment are so
crucial to the defense of a wireless sensor network, with nearly all aspects of wireless sensor

12
network defenses relying on solid encryption, we first begin with an overview of the unique
key and encryption issues surrounding wireless sensor networks before discussing
More specific sensor network defenses

Public Key Cryptography:

Two of the major techniques used to implement public-key cryptosystems are RSA and elliptic
curve cryptography (ECC) .Traditionally; these have been thought to be far too heavy weight
for use in wireless sensor networks.
Recently, however, several groups have successfully implemented public-key cryptography (to
varying degrees) in wireless sensor networks. In Gura et al. report that both RSA and elliptic
curve cryptography are possible using 8-bit CPUs with ECC, demonstrating a performance
advantage over RSA. Another advantage is that ECC’s 160 bit keys result in shorter messages
during transmission compared the 1024 bit RSA keys. In particular Gura et al. demonstrate that
the point multiplication operations in ECC are an order of magnitude faster than private-key
operations within RSA, and are comparable (though somewhat slower) to the RSA public-key
Operation
In Watro et al. show that portions of the RSA cryptosystem can be successfully applied to
actual wireless sensors, specifically the UC Berkeley MICA2 motes. In particular, they
implemented the public operations on the sensors themselves while offloading the private
operations to devices better suited for the larger computational tasks. In this case, a laptop was
used. The Tiny PK system described by is designed specifically to allow authentication
and key agreement between resource constrained sensors. The agreed upon keys may then be
used in conjunction with the existing cryptosystem, Tiny Sec .To do this, they implement the
Diffie-Hellman key exchange algorithm and perform the public-key operations on the Berkeley
motes.
Secure Data Aggregation;
As wireless sensor networks continue to grow in size, so does the amount of data that the
sensor networks are capable of sensing. However, due to the computational constraints placed
on individual sensors, a single sensor is typically responsible for only a small part of the overall
data. Because of this, a query of the wireless sensor network is likely to return a great deal
of raw data, much of which is not of interest to the individual performing the query.
Thus, it is advantageous for the raw data to first be processed so that more meaningful data can
be gleaned from the network. This is typically done using a series of aggregators. An
aggregator is responsible for collecting the raw data from a subset of nodes and
processing/aggregating the raw data from the nodes into more usable data. However, such a
technique is particularly vulnerable to attacks as a single node is used to aggregate multiple
data. Because of this, secure information aggregation techniques are needed in wireless sensor
networks where one or more nodes may be malicious.
Defending Against Physical Attacks:
Physical attacks, as we argued in the beginning of the chapter, pose a great threat to wireless
sensor networks, because of its unattended feature and limited resources. Sensor nodes may be
equipped with physical hardware to enhance protection against various attacks. For example, to
protect against tampering with the sensors, one defense involves tamper-proofing the node’s
Physical package. of low-cost protection countermeasures that make such attacks considerably

13
More difficult, including [4]:
• Randomized Clock Signal Inserting random-time delays between any observable reaction and
critical operations that might be subject to an attack.
• Randomized Multithreading designing a multithread processor architecture that schedules the
processor by hardware between two or more threads of execution randomly at a per-instruction
level
• Robust Low-frequency Sensor Building an intrinsic self-test into the detector. Any attempt to
tamper with the sensor should result in the malfunction of the entire processor.
• Destruction of Test Circuitry Destroying or disabling the special test circuitry which is for the
test engineers, closing the door to micro probing attackers.
• Restricted Program Counter Avoid providing a program counter that can run over the entire
address space.
• Top-layer Sensor Meshes Introducing additional metal layers that form a sensor mesh above
the actual circuit and that do not carry any critical signals to be effective annoyances to micro
probing attackers.

Conclusions:
In the research work it is observed that many organizations are currently deploying wireless networks
typically to use IEEE 802.11b protocols, but technology used is not secure and still highly susceptible to
active attacks and passive intrusions. Currently available security protocols like WEP, WPA and WPA2 have
some advantages and disadvantages and also there are some vulnerability exists in these security protocols.
Various types of security attacks are possible as explained in the previous sections.
The basic idea of this paper is to provide detailed information about security issues and types of attacks WSN
is exposed to some possible measure for countering such attacks. An attempt has been made to explore
security mechanism.

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