A Survey of Attacks, Security Mechanisms and Challenges in Wireless Sensor Networks

TL;DR

This survey reviews various security threats, attack types, and defense mechanisms in wireless sensor networks, highlighting the unique challenges posed by their resource constraints and deployment environments.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive classification of attacks and discusses existing security solutions and challenges specific to wireless sensor networks.

Findings

Wireless sensor networks are vulnerable to numerous attacks due to their deployment environment.

Traditional security solutions are often infeasible because of sensor nodes' limited resources.

Effective security mechanisms must address both attack detection and resource constraints.

Abstract

Wireless Sensor networks (WSN) is an emerging technology and have great potential to be employed in critical situations like battlefields and commercial applications such as building, traffic surveillance, habitat monitoring and smart homes and many more scenarios. One of the major challenges wireless sensor networks face today is security. While the deployment of sensor nodes in an unattended environment makes the networks vulnerable to a variety of potential attacks, the inherent power and memory limitations of sensor nodes makes conventional security solutions unfeasible. The sensing technology combined with processing power and wireless communication makes it profitable for being exploited in great quantity in future. The wireless communication technology also acquires various types of security threats. This paper discusses a wide variety of attacks in WSN and their classification mechanisms and different securities available to handle them including the challenges faced.