ABSTRACT
Wireless sensor networks are widely used in applications to monitor and communicate data. Even though the wireless sensor networks have been broadly used in critical applications, security and privacy issues are major concern. The attackers can gain considerably easy access into a wireless sensor networks and inject malicious data. Wireless sensor networks are considered to be vulnerable to the attacks. The aim of this research is to review the practical scenarios and applications, expose the security vulnerabilities and issues associated with wireless sensor networks specific to applications. The need for research in this area is high since it provides a broad scope to investigate problems and issues in current applications.
1. Introduction
Wireless sensor networks are a set of spatially distributed autonomous nodes over a large area that can cooperatively monitor and communicate the data to the central server through wireless network [1]. Sensor networks are being utilized in many areas, including environmental conditions monitoring, military application, tracking and monitoring animals, detection of harmful animals, smart buildings, structural health monitoring, automobiles, and so on. These wireless sensor networks are capable of detecting specific conditions, such as temperature, pressure, humidity, sound, motion of objects, pollutants. In every application, security is thefundamentalfactor, and mechanisms must be designed to have a secured environment.
7. Conclusion
The modern wireless sensor networks are deployed in a non-enclosed environment. Due to this nature of wireless sensor networks, many security issues arise and hence, wireless sensor networks are vulnerable to attacks. In this report, we consider three application scenarios and security vulnerabilities are exposed based on these applications. This report studies various aspects associated with security issues in wireless sensor networks. The key findings in above research indicate that wireless sensor networks are used in mission critical applications. At the same time, security issues in wireless sensor networks are also equally high.
