A Survey of Intrusion Detection Schemes in Wireless Sensor Networks

Fawaz Fawaz

doi:10.3844/ajassp.2012.1636.1652

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are currently used in many application areas including military applications, health related applications, control and tracking applications and environment and habitat monitoring applications. The harsh and unattended deployment of these networks along with their resource restrictions makes their security issue very important. Prevention-based security approaches like cryptography, authentication and key management have been used to protect WSNs from different kinds of attacks but these approaches are not enough to protect the network from insider attacks that may extract sensitive information even in the presence of the prevention-based solution. Detection-based approaches are then proposed to protect WSNs from insider attacks and act as a second line defense after the failure of the prevention-based approaches. Many intrusion detection schemes have been introduced for WSN in the literature. In this article, we present a survey of intrusion detection schemes in WSNs. First, we present the similar works and show their differences from this work. After that, we outline the fundamentals of intrusion detection in WSNs, describing the types of attacks and state the motivation for intrusion detection in WSNs. Then, we demonstrate the challenges of developing an ideal intrusion detection scheme for WSNs followed by the main requirements of a good candidate intrusion detection scheme. The state-of-the-art intrusion detection schemes are then presented based on the techniques used in each scheme and categorizing them into four main categories: rule-based, data mining and computational intelligence based, game theoretical based and statistical based. The analysis of each scheme in these categories is presented showing their advantages and drawbacks. By the end of each category, we state the general advantages and shortcomings of each category. The survey ends by recommending some important research opportunities in this field for future research.

Highlights

Fundamentals of intrusion detection in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs): We introduce the fundamentals of the intrusion detection in WSN, which includes the definition of the intrusion, types of intrusions/attacks in WSNs, the motivation and need for intrusion detection and the challenges of developing a good candidate intrusion detection scheme for WSN
According to the best of our knowledge, we cannot find any scheme based on this category for intrusion detection in WSN and instead we found some schemes designed for general anomaly/outlier detection like the one-class Support Vector Machines (SVM) scheme used for anomaly detection (Rajasegarar et al, 2007; Zhang et al, 2009)
Design and implementation of EAR algorithms for detecting routing attacks in WSN: Juneja et al (2010) present an intrusion detection scheme for routing attacks in WSN based on EAR algorithm

Summary

Introduction

The semi- fundamentals of WSNs were explored including the supervised intrusion detection schemes require the potential uses of these networks as well as the review knowledge of one class either the normal or the anomaly of factors that affect the design of the sensor to help build the model for detection. Most of the techniques in these schemes follow three the node impersonation and resource depletion attacks main phases: data acquisition phase, rule application phase and intrusion detection phase (Silva et al, 2005).

Results

Conclusion