Security Aspects in Sensor Networks

What is wireless sensor network ?

Sensor network is a network consisting of spatially distributed devices that has limited resources in power, memory and energy. These devices called sensor motes (nodes) and they communicate each other when operating. These sensor motes communicate with base station that has many resources than sensor motes in power, memory and energy. This base station can communicate with sensor motes as well as out side world using internet or intranet facility. Sensor networks used to monitor physical or environmental conditions such as temperature, sound, vibration etc.


Why security is important in sensor networks?

Most of today's computer applications use information from their environment to produce some outputs. This information is gathered using sensor networks that are deployed in unsecure environment. Some of these applications are deployed in battle eld and perimeter defense that need high security concerns in their applications. So that security in sensor networks is more important in most of today's applications. These sensor networks face sensitive security concerns
including eavesdropping, fake of sensor data, denial of service attacks and physical compromise of sensor nodes. Most of security applications that are developed for wireless ad hoc networks are not suited for sensor networks, because of their limited resources in power, speed, memory etc.

Making secure sensor network is a challenge in some aspects. There are few concerns that can identify in secure sensor network.

1. Base station security
2. Authentication in sensor networks
3. Secure data communication among sensor nodes and base station
4. Security in sensor node storage
5. Strong Key management scheme

The Supervisor of this Literature Survey is Dr. Kasun De Zoysa, who is a information system security specialist.
You can have more information on here