Current Challenges and Approaches in Securing Communications for Sensors and Actuators

Abstract

Recent advances in MEMS hardware have enabled small-footprint and inexpensive sensors to be deployed in hard-to-access locations and to form wireless sensor networks (WSNs). WSNs are typically mission-oriented networks and offer appealing solutions to a range of practical problems. However, due to the characteristics of WSN, their design principles differ from other types of networks. For instance, the severe limitations of computational and energy resources in the network nodes restrict their ability to process and communicate information. These characteristics, particular to WSNs, dictate new security challenges and require new approaches to implementation of security protocols. In this chapter, we present some of the WSNs security challenges and discuss a number of selected solutions presented in the technical literature. The structure of the chapter is as follows. In Sect. 1, we provide background material on WSN security; in particular, we present the security goals, implementation constraints, potential attacks and defenses, and evaluation benchmarks. In Sect. 2, we discuss basic security challenges and approaches, including cryptography schemes, key management schemes, and attack detection and prevention mechanisms. Then, in Sects. 3, 4, and 5, we discuss secure routing, secure localization, and secure data aggregation, respectively. Finally, we conclude the survey in Sect. 6.