Security And Attacks In Wireless Sensor Networks

Security in a wireless environment is an important issue which has been investigated by researchers for few years. Recently, the advancements in the miniaturization of the electromechanical systems (MEMS) allowed the appearance of a new type of wireless networks: wireless networks of sensors. Like a type of ad hoc networks, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are useful in a variety of domains; military applications, health monitoring, places monitoring, smart environment, etc. Generally sensors are deployed in hostile environment prone to different types of attacks. Attacker now, has a physical access to sensor node, what is new in securing networks. So security becomes extremely important. Limitations of sensors (computation capability, memory storage, and limited battery energy) make security solutions proposed in wired networks inadequate. In this paper, we present challenges of security, and the different possible attacks in WSNs, discuss the problems of security in each layer of network OSI model. Finally, we conclude the paper with three key questions to address for securing WSNs.