Security in Wireless Sensor Network: A Current Look

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is used to enhance and automate the information capturing capabilities of critical projects such as Medical Monitoring, Scientific Experiments and Research, Industries, Factories, Transportation, etc. Wearable devices, Smart Cities, Smart Agriculture, Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) gaming are some of its newer applications. Governments also use WSN to gather data for their military applications. WSN nodes have gained this massive adoption because they are cheap, modular, programmable, ad-hoc configurable, can operate in an open environment, wirelessly connected, etc. These features also make WSN easy to attack. Data captured by WSN are private or sensitive for individuals or organizations. Hence, security is one of the essential issues of research of WSN. In this paper, we present a current brief review of WSN Security. First, WSN and its architecture is introduced. Then, a layer-wise classification of security attacks and possible mitigation techniques are discussed to understand attacks and their severity. To secure WSN, lightweight cryptographic algorithms are analyzed for their suitability, performance, battery requirements, etc.