An application-driven perspective on wireless sensor network security
Eric Sabbah, Adnan Majeed, Kyoung‐Don Kang, Ke Liu, Nael Abu‐Ghazaleh · 2006
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have recently attracted a lot of interest due to the range of applications they enable. Unfortunately, WSNs are exposed to numerous security threats that can adversely a#ect the success of important applications. Securing WSNs is challenging due to their unique nature as an application and a network, and due to their limited capabilities. In this paper, we argue that the WSN security research generally considers mechanisms that are modeled after and evaluated against abstract applications and WSN organizations. Instead, we propose that an e#ective solution for WSNs must be sensitive to the application and infrastructure. We propose an application-specific security context as the combination of a potential attacker's motivation and the WSN vulnerability. The vulnerability is a function of factors such as the sensor field, the WSN infrastructure, the application, protocols and system software, as well the accessibility and the observability of the WSN. To reduce the vulnerability, we argue that WSN design must balance traditional objectives such as energy e#ciency, cost, and application level performance with security to a degree proportional to the attacker's motivation. We illustrate this argument via two example applications.