Behavioural Modelling of WSN MAC Layer Security Attacks: A Sequential UML Approach

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are growing enormously and becoming increasingly attractive for a variety of application areas such as tele-health monitoring, industry monitoring, home automation and many more. The primary weakness shared by all wireless application and technologies is the vulnerability to security attacks/threats. The performance and behaviour of a WSN are vastly affected by such attacks. In order to be able to better address the vulnerabilities of WSNs in terms of security, it is important to understand the behaviour of the attacks. This paper addresses the behavioural modelling of medium access control (MAC) security attacks in WSNs. The MAC layer is responsible for energy consumption, delay and channel utilization of the network and attacks on this layer can introduce significant degradation of the individual sensor nodes due to energy drain and in performance due to delays. The behavioural modelling of attacks will be beneficial for designing efficient and secure MAC layer protocols. The security attacks are modelled using a sequential diagram approach of Unified Modelling Language (UML). Further, a new attack definition, specific to hybrid MAC mechanisms, is proposed.