Security in Wireless Sensor Networks

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a set of autonomous sensors with computing, storage, energy and wireless transmission capabilities, which work together to observe a phenomenon in a physical environment.

This technology benefits from a number of properties that have made it so successful, including low cost and ease of deployment, wireless communication, and the ability to deploy sensors within the monitored environment, which is sometimes hostile to human presence. These properties have encouraged the use of RCSFs in a variety of monitoring applications that were previously costly, complex or even unfeasible. These applications include monitoring in environments hostile to human presence, such as volcanic activity or radiation levels in nuclear facilities, monitoring patients or people with reduced mobility at home, detecting intrusions into the security perimeters of sensitive establishments, and monitoring the environment of crops (soil and atmosphere). However, given the sensitivity of these potential applications, which are generally closely linked to the physical world, systems control and humans, large-scale deployment of RCSF depends on the reliability offered by this technology. In particular, security emerges as a difficult issue in FCSNs due to the resource limitations (energy, memory, bandwidth, etc.) in this type of network.

This article presents a state-of-the-art review of security in SCNs. We show that the main causes of vulnerability in this technology stem from the properties that have made it so successful. We then present the attacks that result from these properties, as well as the solutions proposed in the literature. These solutions cover key management, routing security and aggregation security. They are analyzed in the light of the constraints of this technology.