Secure Opportunistic Watchdog Production in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Review

Finding the security vulnerabilities and solving the issues in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are mandatory tasks for providing secure data transmission. Attackers or intruders are rising with various types of network harming activities. Due to the open shared medium of WSN, the services can be easily broken. Intrusion Detection System (IDS) helps to keep the network secure against the attackers. At the same time, it is not sufficient against numerous real time attackers. There are plenty of attacks are injected in wireless transmissions. So, taking a deep survey and finding the needs in security perspective are very important jobs. This survey article analyses the problems and solutions given on secure routing and successful watchdog production in WSN. Collectively, this survey helps to understand IDS techniques, WSN characteristics, secure routing, key management techniques and watchdog construction strategies in detail. Finally, this article states some notable problems and solutions for providing optimal watchdog productions. This keeps WSN free from attackers and intruders. As watchdog is a light weight agent, the techniques and protocols used for intrusion detection shall not create maximum overhead and any runtime issues. In this regard, this work analyses various proactive and reactive routing protocols, light weight cryptography techniques and attack types. From the analysis, this deep survey suggests the optimal usage of secure routing protocols and hardware efficient security algorithms. This survey extends its contribution to reveal the adaptability of efficient cryptography techniques, attacks detection algorithms and protocols with real-time watchdogs. This work significantly contributes for watchdog based intrusion detection in low powered WSN. The performance comparisons and the results given in this work deliver the overall technical benefits and limitations of various techniques.