Abstract
Wireless sensor network has attracted significant attention in research and development due to its tremendous applications in medical, military and defence, medical, environmental, industrial, infrastructure protection, and commercial applications to enable to interact with each other controlled remotely. A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) has wide applications such as environmental monitoring and tracking of the target nodes for communication. The sensor nodes are equipped with wireless interfaces used for communication between the nodes and another network. Wireless Sensor Network suffers from many constraints that make security a primary challenge. When the sensor node is deployed in a communication environment unattended, the nodes are vulnerable to various attacks. This paper deals with the different types of Active and Passive security attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks to design effective countermeasures for secured communication. This paper will help researchers identify the most vulnerable attacks in the communication and defensive mechanisms to encounter the attacks in WSN.
1. Introduction
Wireless Sensor Networks are large-scale networks made of Selfconfigured and spatially distributed, small size devices, low cost, low power using sensors to collect and transfer the data in the wireless communication channel. The sensor nodes are designed so that it is feasible to work with limited facilities like energy, memory, computation, and the transmission channel. The WSN consists of several sensing nodes that interact with each other, and they are distributed and in a spatial way on any physical/environmental phenomenon. The classic wireless sensor node consists of four main parts Sensor Module, a Processing & Memory Module, Transceiver Module, and a Power Unit. The sensor nodes in a network can process, gather information, and interact with other nodes [1]. The main goals of the WSN are privacy or confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and availability. WSNs utilize multiple services to share the frequency spectrum and use similar and different protocols [2]. WSNs are self-organizing, self-repairing, and operate a dynamic topology in the multi-hop environment, which faults tolerance and vulnerability to malicious attacks.
7. Conclusion
The paper summarized the security challenges and constraints of wireless sensor networks and various security attacks in the WSN. The active and passive attacks are analyzed, which gives the researchers an insight into various attacks in WSN. The users should also know about the privacy issues and permissions given for the data and how they misuse the information and propose future research exploring the effective security mechanisms and countermeasures.
