A Survey of Active Attacks on Wireless Sensor Networks and their Countermeasures

TL;DR

This survey reviews active attacks on wireless sensor networks, highlighting security threats, attack types, and various countermeasures, emphasizing the unique challenges posed by WSNs' resource constraints.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of active attacks and summarizes existing countermeasures, filling a gap in consolidated knowledge on WSN security.

Findings

Identifies four basic security threats to WSNs.

Details numerous active attack types and their impacts.

Summarizes proposed countermeasures from various research works.

Abstract

Lately, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have become an emerging technology and can be utilized in some crucial circumstances like battlegrounds, commercial applications, habitat observing, buildings, smart homes, traffic surveillance and other different places. One of the foremost difficulties that WSN faces nowadays is protection from serious attacks. While organizing the sensor nodes in an abandoned environment makes network systems helpless against an assortment of strong assaults, intrinsic memory and power restrictions of sensor nodes make the traditional security arrangements impractical. The sensing knowledge combined with the wireless communication and processing power makes it lucrative for being abused. The wireless sensor network technology also obtains a big variety of security intimidations. This paper describes four basic security threats and many active attacks on WSN with their possible countermeasures proposed by different research scholars.