Wireless Sensor Network and Two Issues along with countermeasures

Abstract: Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is the contemporary and future model of network for major businesses. The concept of sensing technology is very attractive for most of the organization’s military and healthcare. The intention of this paper is to do research on two common issues and challenges of WSN and propose counter measures and solutions through finding from scholarly references. This paper elaborates on holistic view of WSN common security problems. We identified threats for the WSN and added measures to safeguard from those threats from the research papers.

Introduction: Advancement in technology with wireless networks enables to implement low cost and effective communication network which utilizes less power with multi-functional sensor nodes. The function of these sensor nodes is to collect data, process and communicate to the destination. These Sensors are battery powered in the locations. These sensor nodes collect data from external world. WSN has huge potential to be used across various applications. Regular networking has communication points like one-one or one-many data conversation but WSN can access across multiple nodes at same time to sense data, process and send data to target location or server. WSNs are more likely used in military for surveillance and sending information back where the network cannot be established through dedicated lines. These locations should be secured under controlled environment through monitoring. These are very advantages in distributing these sensors into different geographic locations and they collect data from those areas. These are widely used in areas like Geo sensing, environmental monitoring, target tracking etc. In this wireless sensors networks the data is collected through wireless receivers. These features attracted many scholars to do research on these sensors to make advancements and avoid flaws by implementing more security measures for future advancements in technology. The major challenge in implementing the security always depends on memory, size of sensors and processing power. Problem Statement: Here we are going to address two issues called Denial of Service and Hallow Flood attack.

Research Question: Literature Review: Denial of Service Attack: This is an attack the leads to in accessibility of network for the users by shutting down the network and machine. This is accomplished by flooding the traffic or information to the server nodes which will eventually triggers crash. In these cases customers or users will no longer access their accounts. In most of the cases the intruders target the web services of the provider network. This cause shutdown of website and accounts for employees or users, which in turn a huge loss for the businesses like banking and finance. There are two common methods of Dos Attacks called flooding services and crashing services. Flooding services are created by sending heavy traffic to the server which may handshake or not, which will not allow actual/ intended users to access and eventually stops the whole service. Buffer Over Flow attacks are very common attack which will send more traffic than the capacity built to handle. ICMP flood is created by sending spoof packets that reaches every computer on network thus the network traffic is increased making unavailable to the actual purpose. This is alternatively called as ping of death or smurf attack. Syn Flood tries to saturate the available ports in the network by sending request to connect to server but never completes a connection.