On Confidentiality, Integrity, Authenticity, and Freshness (CIAF) in WSN

Abstract

A Wireless sensor network (WSN) comprises several sensor nodes such as magnetic, thermal, and infrared, and the radar is set up in a particular geographical area. The primary aim of sensor network is to transmit reliable, secure data from one node to another node, node to base station and vice versa and from base station to all nodes in a network and to conserve the energy of sensor nodes. On the other hand, there are several restrictions such as large energy consumption, limited storage/memory and processing ability, higher latency, and insufficient resources. The related security issues in wireless sensor network are authenticity, confidentiality, robustness, integrity, and data freshness. The sensor nodes are susceptible to several attacks such as DOS, Sybil, flood, black hole, selective forwarding which results in the leakage of sensitive and valuable information. It is therefore necessary to provide security against these critical attacks in the network. Wireless sensor network were earlier used for military applications with the objective of monitoring friendly and opposing forces, battlefield surveillance, detection of attacks, but today Wireless Networking have a huge number of applications-environmental, healthcare, home, industrial, commercial and are still counting. This paper is an extensive review of the security requirements, attacks that are to be avoided and resolved for achieving a secure network connection. This paper also emphasizes various limitations and defense strategies to prevent threats and attacks. The issues of applications of wireless sensor network for smooth and reliable transmissions are also discussed. The sensor networks are popular for mission-critical-tasks and security is immensely required for such hostile environment employed networks.