An application-driven approach to designing secure wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have recently attracted a lot of interest due to the wide range of applications they enable. Unfortunately, WSNs are exposed to numerous security threats that can adversely affect the success of important applications. Securing WSNs is challenging due to their limited capabilities and the unique nature of the network and applications. In this paper, we argue that the WSN security research generally considers mechanisms that are modeled after and evaluated against abstract applications and WSN organizations. Instead, we propose that the solution for WSN security must be sensitive to the application and infrastructure. Specifically, we formulate a new notion of an application-specific security context as the combination of a potential attacker's motivation and the WSN vulnerability. The vulnerability is a function of factors such as the sensor field, WSN infrastructure, application, protocols, system software, accessibility, and the observability of the WSN. To reduce the vulnerability, we argue that WSN design must balance security with traditional objectives such as the cost, energy efficiency, and application level performance to a degree proportional to the attacker's motivation. We illustrate this argument via four example applications. Overall, our work can be considered a basis to derive more grounded and realistic assumptions for WSN security and develop cost-effective security solutions to handle application-specific vulnerabilities in WSNs. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.