A policy based security management architecture for sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks are subjected to several types of attacks specially attacks of denial of service types (DoS). Several mechanisms and techniques were proposed to provide security to wireless sensor networks, like cryptographic process, key management protocols, intrusion detection systems, node revocation schemas, secure routing, and secure data fusion. A recent work proposes a security management framework to dynamically configure and reconfigure security components in sensor networks according to management information collected by sensor nodes and sent to decision-maker management entities. It turns on or off security components only when they are necessary, saving power and extend network lifetime. The architecture is policy based, what enable rules configuration specific for each application. We evaluate that security management framework, showing possibilities to save power and how that work can contribute to extend network lifetime. We propose some scenarios to evaluate the performance of the security management framework and estimate the cost of security components.