Security in wireless sensor networks: State-of-the-art, challenges and opportunities

Recent advances have witnessed the popularity and success of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in the past decade. The increase of the public presence and cyber footprint of WSNs opens up avenues for compromise to hackers and individuals with malicious intent. Securing WSNs becomes one of the highest priorities for the deployment of real world sensing applications. This chapter presents the state-of-the-art security studies in WSNs. We identify four security objectives including confidentiality, integrity, availability, and privacy, and survey how each of them can be exploited in the sensor network environment. Our main goal is to deliver a systematic study on the WSN security issues by summarizing the existing attacks and countermeasures, comparing their features, and proposing a taxonomy of attacks using an attack-defensetree- based approach. Based on the investigation results and our analysis, we identify the current research challenges and opportunities towards building a securer sensor network environment.