Taxonomy of Security Attacks in Sensor Networks and Countermeasures

Ad-hoc sensor networks have become common over the past few years and the domain of their application is increasing widely. However, the security of these networks poses a great challenge due to the fact that they consist of tiny wireless devices which have limited hardware and energy resources. In addition, these networks are generally deployed and then left unattended. These facts coupled together make it impractical to directly apply the traditional security mechanisms to the sensor network paradigm. Therefore, there is a need to analyze and better understand the security requirements of sensor networks. This paper provides a comprehensive taxonomy of security attacks on sensor networks, and gives solutions for each set of attacks. More importantly, it points out the research directions which need to be investigated in the future.