Investigation of Threats, Vulnerabilities, Attacks, and Approaches in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have emerged as significant technology that has been adopted in various research fields to monitor the physical environments and collect information from the surroundings. However, WSNs are more vulnerable to attacks owing to their significant characteristics, including dynamicity in network topology and resource constraints. Multiple methods have been investigated to efficiently identify the different types of threats and attacks over the WSN. However, most of the existing works focus on a specific type of attack detection and lack in analyzing their performance. This survey highlights the significant functionalities of WSN, applications, and security requirements. From the viewpoint of security measurements, the authors have classified the survey study as security towards data collections and routing in WSN. Also, various security attacks based on protocol stack layers are classified. Finally, the authors have emphasized the significant security challenges in this research field based on the prior studies followed by the conclusion.