Security in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a special ad hoc network. It consists of a large number of sensors communicating with wireless links to monitor the real-world environment. They have limited energy, computational power, memory, and transmission range. They are widely used in different fields like military operations, environmental monitoring, and healthcare applications. However, the openness and hostility of the deployment space and the resources limitations make these networks vulnerable to several types of attacks and intrusions. So, the WSN security becomes a real challenge. Principally, the attacks in the network aim at damaging the smooth running of the legitimate nodes and cause a dysfunction of the network. Sybil attack is one of the perilous attacks which affects the WSN networks and poses threats to many security goals. This attack makes the sensor node into Sybil node and illegitimately takes and claims multiple identities.