A Survey on Attacks, Security Mechanisms and Secure Extensions of Hierarchical Clustering Based Sensor Networks

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Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consists of large number of sensors deployed in regions required by the applications to collect information about the surrounding environment. WSNs are highly vulnerable to security attacks at various levels due to their distributed nature, multi-hop data forwarding, and open wireless medium. A clustering-based routing protocol LEACH is a successful protocol for routing in WSNs as well as evenly utilizing energy of sensor nodes since all sensor nodes have limited source of energy. However, LEACH protocol also has some flaws which can attract attackers and they can cause serious damage either physically or it can also steal information from the network. Due to this reason security is the main problem of LEACH protocol and many secure versions of this protocol have been designed to make it resilient against insider as well as outsider attackers. In this paper, we discuss some of the threats in WSNs along with various kinds of attacks as well as mechanism to deal with such threats. Furthermore, we discuss LEACH protocol and its extensions, various techniques used to define secure LEACH which can protect network from entering intruders. Lastly, we compare some secure LEACH schemes like cryptographic-based or trust-based scheme.