A survey on wireless sensor networks security issues and military specificities

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), driven from multiple engineering disciplines, provide a communication infrastructure for various types of critical and innovative applications. These kinds of miniaturised, autonomous, versatile, lightweighted and autoconfigurable networks have inherent issues that are considered as a very interesting research area. Even if the use of WSN is diverse it seems that they are favored within critical applications where life and safety are involved, such as military surveillance and health care. The sensitive nature of the data exchanged over these networks puts security aspects at the top of conceptual and implementation considerations. In fact this is due to the inherent WSN vulnerability issues that are caused by the hostile environments in which they are deployed. Moreover, limited energy and computing resources of connected wireless nodes add complexity to these issues. In this paper, we aim to describe the new challenges in securing data collection and exchange in WSN, by investigating major security threats and by presenting recent major research advances in this area, with a special focus on the specificities related to military applications.