Classification of Security Attacks in WSNs and Possible Countermeasures: A Survey

Wireless sensor networks are best known for their applications in continuous monitoring of physical parameters and in network processing capabilities. However, a WSN is vulnerable to security breaches of data and nodes. Security is a challenging issue for WSN, as they have limited energy and other resources. The fact that they are deployed in extreme and ever changing environmental conditions makes it more difficult for WSN to be secure all the time. There are a variety of security attacks that target resource constrained nodes of WSN. In this paper, we present classification of security threats that are very strenuous and difficult to detect. In the later part of the paper, we discuss various countermeasures that are proposed by researchers for each of these attacks. It is concluded that network layer attacks in WSN can be detected and prevented by various methodologies but Trust Based intrusion detection is a good candidate for mitigating the problem.