Security Requirements in Wireless Sensor Networks

WSN is used in many applications from indoor to outdoor. While transmitting information in the network it is important to provide security. Security is considered to be the most challenging task in WSN as its tough to keep a watch on the sensor nodes/network every time.

Attack and attacker are the most common terms used in the security. The attacker is the one who is an unauthorized to access the data of the network or tries to mislead the information. When an attacker accesses the services of the network is known as attack.

WSN is designed in the form of layers. These layers help to protect the sensor from various attacks.

 Security in the Wireless Sensor Networks has various difficulties, some common are: dynamically changing topology, wireless communication among the sensor nodes, infrastructure-less framework, and limited physical resources like energy source, memory capacity and very low communication bandwidth.

SECURITY REQUIREMENTS:

 Data Confidentiality: In sensor network, data flows from many intermediate nodes and chance of data leak is more]. To provide the data confidentiality, an encrypted data is used so that only recipient decrypts the data to its original form. 

Data Integrity: Data received by the receiver should not be altered or modified is Data Integrity. Original data is changed by intruder or due to harsh environment. The intruder may change the data according to its need and sends this new data to the receiver. 

Data Authentication: It the procedure of confirmation that the communicating node is the one that it claims to be. It is important for receiver node to do verification that the data is received from an authenticate node. 

Data Availability: Data Availability means that the services are available all the time even in case of some attacks such as Denial of service. 

Source Localization: For data transmission some applications use location information of the sink node. It is important to give security to the location information. Non-secured data can be controlled by the malicious node by sending false signal strengths or replaying signals.

 Self-Organization: In WSN no fixed infrastructure exists, hence, every node is independent having properties of adaptation to the different situations and maintains self organizing and self healing properties. This is a great challenge for security in WSN. 

Data Freshness: Data freshness means that each message transmitted over the channel is new and fresh. It guarantees that the old messages cannot be replayed by any node. This can be solved by adding some time related counter to check the freshness of the data.

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