Classification and analysis of security attacks in WSNs and IEEE 802.15.4 standards : A survey

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are an emerging technology due to its huge number of applications such as military investigations and civilian scenarios. Once deployed, these networks are unprotected and unattended thereby making them prone to several security attacks. These sensor nodes cannot use conventional solutions for providing security because of limited battery and memory supply. Also WSNs are vulnerable to attacks because of broadcast nature of medium, resource constrained SNs, dynamic network topology and large network scales. The paper provides survey of various attacks in sensor networks such as wormhole attack, sinkhole attack, selective forwarding attack, man-in-the-middle attack and Sybil attacks. IEEE 802.15.4 standard is a dominating technology for WSNs. The article focuses on unified survey of IEEE 802.15.4 standard attacks. In this article, we discuss all these attacks and countermeasures to defend these attacks.