Security Requirements in Wireless Sensor Networks

1. Security Requirements

1.1 Confidentiality

Confidentiality requirement is needed to ensure that sensitive information is well protected and not revealed to unauthorized third parties.

The confidentiality objective is required in sensors’ environment to protect information traveling between the sensor nodes of the network or between the sensors and the base station from disclosure, since an adversary having the appropriate equipment may eavesdrop on the communication. By eavesdropping, the adversary could overhear critical information such as sensing data and routing information. Based on the sensitivity of the data stolen, an adversary may cause severe damage since he can use the sensing data for many illegal purposes i.e. sabotage, blackmail. For example, competitors may use the data to produce a better product i.e. safety monitoring sensor application. Furthermore, by stealing routing information the adversary could introduce his own malicious nodes into the network in an attempt to overhear the entire communication.

If we consider eavesdropping to be a network level threat, then a local level threat could be a compromised node that an adversary has in his possession. Compromised nodes are a big threat to confidentiality objective since the adversary could steal critical data stored on nodes such as cryptographic keys that are used to encrypt the communication.

1.2 Authentication

As in conventional systems, authentication techniques verify the identity of the participants in a communication, distinguishing in this way legitimate users from intruders.

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Security Requirements in Wireless Sensor Networks