Security vulnerabilities, attacks and countermeasures in wireless sensor networks at various layers of OSI reference model: A survey

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) security is a topic of great importance because of advancement of many security sensitive applications in diverse fields involving WSNs. Compared to traditional wireless and wired networks, WSNs also possess numerous additional vulnerabilities such as dynamic network topology, broadcast nature of the medium, resource constrained nodes, immense network scale and lack of physical infrastructure. The open communication environment makes WSNs more vulnerable than wired communications to several types of attacks including the passive type of eavesdropping attack leading to intercepted transmissions and active type of jamming attack leading to disrupted transmissions. These additional vulnerabilities enable the adversary to launch severe and even more complicated attacks. Thus a thorough investigation of attacks that can be launched against WSNs is required. Therefore, this article is motivated for examining the wireless security vulnerabilities and the imposed threats to devise reliable and efficient defence technique for improvement of WSNs security. We first summarize the security challenges and the security requirements of wireless networks. The paper then throws light on security vulnerabilities in wireless networks and classifies various attacks in WSNs according to different OSI protocol layers. Finally, some open technical challenges which are still unsolved are summarized and future works in WSNs security are discussed.