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Security architectures in wireless sensor network

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Abstract

Sensor networks are an apt amalgamation of sensing, processing and communication. These networks are formed using tiny inexpensive sensor nodes which have the attributes of low processing power and short radio ranges. They steer themselves to numerous applications and at the same instance, encounter stark energy constraints and face scarce memory resources. The discerning personas of sensor networks also have a direct influence on the hardware design of these nodes. Innumerable hardware platforms like Crossbow, Intel, and IvMote have been fabricated to examine the ideas of the research community and to implement applications in all arenas of science and technology. With so many applications designed in this area, security issues are of paramount importance. In this article, security architectures on the two layers of the network stack—link layer and network layer have been surveyed. The paper surveys the various security requirements for designing a wireless sensor network discussing the architecture of the protocols in comparison with the security primitives of IEEE 802.15.4 standard for wireless sensor network (Shon and Choi in Towards the implementation of reliable data transmission for 802.15.4-based wireless sensor. Ubiquitous intelligence and computing, 5061. Lecture notes in computer science, 363–372, 2008). The paper examines TinySec (Karlof et al. in TinySec: a link layer security architecture for wireless sensor networks. In: Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on embedded networked sensor systems, 2004) a standard protocol used in TinyOS; the operating system deployed in sensor networks; and C-Sec (Moh’d et al. in C-Sec: energy efficient link layer encryption protocol for wireless sensor networks. In: Proceedings in consumer communications and networking conference (CCNC), 2012) at the link layer and MiniSec (Luk et al. in iniSec: a secure sensor network communication architecture. In: Proceedings of the 6th international conference on information processing in sensor networks (IPSN ‘07), New York, 2007) and MoteSec-Aware (Tsou et al. in IEEE Trans Wirel Commun 12(6):2817–2829, 2013) at the network layer. The survey focusses on the vulnerabilities dealt by each protocol, their challenges with respect to energy consumption, scalability and availability. It also highlights the challenges that the protocols have not been able to handle because of resource restrictions. It also projects some future research directions in the area of security.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Lal Bahadur Shastri Institute of Management, Dwarka, Delhi, India

    Vandana Bhasin

  2. School of Computer and Systems Sciences, Jawahar Lal University, Delhi, India

    Sushil Kumar, P. C. Saxena & C. P. Katti

Authors
  1. Vandana Bhasin
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  2. Sushil Kumar
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  3. P. C. Saxena
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  4. C. P. Katti
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Correspondence to Vandana Bhasin.

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Bhasin, V., Kumar, S., Saxena, P.C. et al. Security architectures in wireless sensor network. Int. j. inf. tecnol. 12, 261–272 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41870-018-0103-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41870-018-0103-6

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