Secure Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) is an emerging area that has a wide spectrum of critical applications like battlefield surveillance, emergency disaster relief systems, etc. Sensor devices used in such networks are designed to operate with limited resources. Therefore, they are simple to build, economically viable and can be deployed to closely interact with their environment. In order to reduce the amount of data to be transmitted they perform in-network processing by aggregating useful information. These characteristics of sensor networks pose unique challenges for routing data securely over wireless communication channels. Traditional security techniques cannot be adopted easily due to resource constraints. Security in WSNs can be properly addressed only by integrating secure data transmission into the routing process itself. In this paper we outline different routing attacks in WSN and discuss how various sensor network routing protocols breakdown in the face of those attacks. We then list a set of attributes that would make a routing protocol more secure. Finally we study a new protocol called Secure Sensor Network Routing Protocol [17] that was designed to be resilient to routing attacks and analyze the strength of its security.