Secure Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks:Attacks and Countermeasures

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INTRODUCTION
Our focus is on routing security in wireless sensor networks. Current proposals for routing protocols in sensor networks optimize for the limited capabilities of the nodes and the application specific nature of the networks, but do not consider security.


We make five main contributions.
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• We propose threat models and security goals for secure routing in wireless sensor networks.
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• We introduce two novel classes of previously undocumented attacks against sensor networks1 – sinkhole attacks and HELLO floods.
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• We show, for the first time, how attacks against ad-hoc wireless networks and peer to-peer networks [1], [2] can Funded in These attacks are relevant to some ad-hoc wireless networks as well be adapted into powerful attacks against sensor networks.


BACKGROUND
We use the term sensor network to refer to a heterogeneous system combining tiny sensors and actuators with general purpose computing elements. Sensor networks may consist of hundreds or thousands of low-power, low-cost nodes, possibly mobile but more likely at fixed locations, deployed en masse to monitor and affect the environment.


RELATED WORK
Security issues in ad-hoc networks are similar to those in sensor networks and have been well enumerated in the literature [8], [9], but the defense mechanisms developed for ad-hoc networks are not directly applicable to sensor networks. There are several reasons for why this is so, but they all relate to the differences between sensor and ad-hoc networks enumerated in the previous section


CONCLUSION
Secure routing is vital to the acceptance and use of sensor networks for many applications, but we have demonstrated that currently proposed routing protocols for these networks are insecure.