A survey on Wireless Sensor Network Attacks And Defenses

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are combination of several thousand sensor nodes that have several capabilities such as to detect, to sense, to monitor, to process and to compute. WSN have many applications in real time scenarios such as in military, industries, health care and so on. WSN has infrastructure less structure, so the ability to cope with the node failure, fault tolerance and its security attack are the main concern. The sensor nodes are more vulnerable to security threats and attacks because of the harsh and hostile environment. Efficient implementation of different security protocols has huge impact to adverse the potential threat. The main aim of this paper is to present security issues and challenges faced by WSN. This paper explains attacks in WSN, its flaws and their countermeasures that can be used to handle the pitfall. Key Terms: Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN); Denial of service (DOS); Attack; securitymechanism. INTRODUCTION Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) consists of large number of low-cost, low-power, self-configured, resource constraint sensor nodes that are equipped with specialized sensors and wireless transceiver. These sensing nodes are scattered over the region and designed to do the specific task. The task includes capturing and gathering the data from the surrounding and forwarding the same to the reporting sites or control sites where the data can be observed and analyzed. The other task includes responding to the queries sent from the reporting sites or control sites to do the specific task without any glitches and provides sensing samples for further verification. Sometimes WSN are also called as Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks (WSAN) as these sensor nodes are sometimes equipped with actuators to “act” upon specific condition. With the recent development in micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS), it became possible for us to manufacture large number of small sensing devices. These sensing devices have different components such as data analysis ormonitoring the communication. The structure or architecture of WSN device contains a processor, memory, transceiver, power source, and some interfaces for external sensors. However, security of data at sensor node is the main concern. In this paper, various WSN attacks are discussed in detail including Denial of service (DOS) attack. Also discussed various defense mechanisms to counterattack the same. Possible solutions for each layer-wise attacks are also mentioned. This paper is organized into different sections as follows: Section II describes Goals, Application domain, and challenges faced by WSNs, Section III gives Literature Review, Section IV explains different Attacks and methods to countermeasures the same, Section V shows Result and Analysis for the same and finally Conclusion with Future Work has been presented