Journal of Computer Applications (JCA) ISSN: 0974-1925, Volume V, Issue 3, 2012

Security Framework for Wireless Sensor Networks

K. Sivakumar *, Dr. T. Ravichandran Abstract - Wireless sensor network is more prone to adversary compare to common wireless network. This is due to the nature of wireless sensor network that encompasses many nodes, thus making the system more vulnerable. Another reason is the nature of wireless sensor network as an ad-hoc network, making it having no hierarchal structure, complicating management tasks. Deploying new technology without security in mind has often proved to be unreasonably dangerous. One of the most fundamental rights in a healthy society is the right of every citizen to be left alone. Article 12 of the U.N, Universal Announcement of Human Rights, states that No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence., in genuineness, though this right is more and more being trod upon, along with undreamed of comforts and amenities for the population in common. The digital riot has made it possible to gather as well as store facts about human performance on a considerable scale. We leave electronic routes everywhere we go, routes that are being watched, analyzed and sold without our knowledge or even control. With this Security and Confidentiality solutions are mandatory aspects when developing new pervasive technologies such as wireless sensor networks (WSN). This paper analyses the security issues, threats and attacks and requirements of wireless sensor networks. This paper further proposes security framework and security architecture to integrate existing technologies with WSN technology, to provide secure and private communications to its users. Index Terms Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), Security, Framework, Authentication, SNEP. I. INTRODUCTION Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), also known as sensor webs, constitute a rapidly developing area of research. In a WSN, a spread pool of sensor nodes forms a network interconnected by wireless communication links. Each sensor node acts as an evidence source, sensing and collecting data samples from its situation. Sensor nodes execute routing functions, creating a multi-hop wireless networking stuff that conveys data samples to other sensor nodes and to external destinations. In addition, sensor nodes can act as information sinks, receiving dynamic configuration information through the networking fabric from external entities or other sensor
Manuscript received 8/Sept/2012. Manuscript selected 11/Sept/2012. K. Sivakumar, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Hindusthan Institute of Technology, Pollachi Road, Coimbatore, Tamilnadu, India, 9944881639 E-mail: rksivakumar@gamil.com. Dr. T. Ravichandran, Principal, Hindusthan Institute of Technology, Pollachi Road, Coimbatore, Tamilnadu, India, 9944183119 E-mail: dr.t.ravichandran@gmail.com.
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nodes. The scale of sensor networks is often orders of magnitude better than that of wireless networks. There may be tens of thousands of nodes in a sensor network, as related to tens of nodes in a normal wireless network. Sensor networks are often densely deployed, i.e., the number of nodes deployed per unit area is much greater than wireless networks. Sensor networks are dynamic in that they involve extending or collapsing the network with the addition and deletion of sensor nodes after deployment without physical contact. New nodes may be added to replace failing and unreliable nodes or to extend the network. As nodes fail, they get deleted from the network. Sensor networks can be deployed in hostile territory, where they are subject to communication surveillance and node capture and compromise by adversaries. Sensor nodes mainly use broadcast communication patterns whereas wireless ad-hoc networks use mostly point-to-point communication. Therefore, it is more than obvious that such diversified environments necessitate the employment of security mechanisms at different levels. In future smart environments, it is likely that WSN will play a key role in identifying, gathering, and broadcasting information about the situation around us. Sensor networks are expected to play a major role in the emerging era of ubiquitous computing. WSNs are expected to be deployed in a diverse number of applications ranging from wildlife and ocean monitoring up to military presentations and the home locations. It is thus, more than noticeable that such diversified locations necessitate the engagement of security mechanisms at different levels. In summary the most important reasons for that are the following: The computation power existing in embedded systems is restricted and may be insufficient for the dispensation of security algorithms, The battery ability is also restricted and their life duration is strongly connected to the amount of calculation performed in the embedded processor, The amount of storage is limited also, WSN systems can be retrieved more definitely than fix systems by attackers. Really they must be secure against mischievous things, The collection of attack rises very rapidly so at the same time the WSN must be flexible adequate to support the rapid growth of security tools and standards. This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 discusses various scenarios of WSN. Section 3 gives the Security Framework discussing threats and attacks, the requirements based on the scenarios and security issues in WSNs. Section 4 discussed the proposed security architecture. Finally, concluding the paper in Section 5 with Decisions and the research challenges in WSN.

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2.2. Environmental Monitoring (Wildlife Sensors, Vast Deployment Area) This application deployed sensors in an infinite area and sometimes even also in animal body. The devices will be very narrow in computational difficulty and having power constraints. The network will be very infinite without existence of base station thus very robust routing algorithm is needed. Aggregation may be an alternative but not in wildlife monitoring for the nodes may be spread on some areas without any surrounding base station. Redundancy is a must for this tender by having several nodes at same reconnaissance location. On the other hand, security is quiet important to confirm its reliability and integrity. Thus this application can be established of having a huge arrangement area with vast and multi-hop network, dynamic network, and severe hardware check and control constraints.
Figure 1. WSN is Medical Scenario

II. WSN APPLICATIONS AND SCENARIOS Sensor networks may consist of several different types of sensors such as seismic, thermal, electrical, visual, acoustic, radar and so on. Sensor networks have a wide range of applications in a number of domains, a few of which have been listed below [1, 2]. Medical Application (see Figure 2) Sensors in this application are attached to human body and carries very specific and confidential information regarding persons health status, condition, or other vital information. Some applications allow decision to be made upon observation of these sensors, making sensors more potential target for adversary. In some situations sensor data are placid at a more cultured node (node with higher hardware specification) before sending it to base station. This node can act as a combination node to sensors in its own area. Network topology may change with passion as a person moves from one location to another. Self-organizing and firm adapting network is also important as data must be very up to date concerning the very important nature of data. As many sensor network, hardware limitation also plays a role in this application. Thus we can complete that the environment for sensor in this application requires high security but existence of higher volume node in each small area can act as base station or gathering point. The network should also have ability in modifying to network change with high constancy. 2.1. Object Presence/Moving Object Sensor The situation of this application may vary from indoor to outdoor, from small utilization area to vast organization area. Each application however has certain characteristics which remains the same. Sensors are deployed in hazardous area to monitor irregular phenomenon. These sensors are short in hardware capacity, limited battery, and high redundancy within a small area. Existence of base station may not occur in large area, thus imposing the network to have multi-hop network. Even though sensors are essentially static but network topology still experience rapid change due to sensor entering and departure network for saving its lifetime energy. In vital services, consistency and bloom is also important to this application. This application involves dynamically changing network topology, with hardware check. Base station can be establish and high security to ensure validation, confidentiality, and integrity is needed for vital application.

2.3. Safety Application for Vehicle A wireless sensor network could efficiently fulfill in a car a great number of functions, which are today carried out manually or in wired manner, negatively impacting the installation cost (see Figure 3). For such a purpose, a star constructed network will be the best solution, where all the sensors fixed in the car endlessly transfer data to a fundamental controller. Vital data rates and maximum latency for different requests may vary depending on the utility of specific sensors. For illustration, sensors could be used for tire pressure monitoring or for rain detection on the windshield, so to automatically trigger wipers. This kind of sensors would usually send data to a central controller every ten seconds, so it would involve very low data rates. Also, sensors with RF capabilities could be employed for head-on collision detection, in order to activate air bags inside the car. In this case, being the transferred data highly time sensitive, this application would require very low latency. Note that, because of heterogeneity of requirements in the automotive environment, the central controller has to establish priorities among the different applications.

Figure 2. LDR Networks in Automotive Applications

In this situation, the need for long lasting batteries is more evident than in the case of the home environment. Many of the sensors installed in a car would be hardly reachable. In case of the tire pressure sensor, for instance, a battery replacement between two tire changes would be unusable. Therefore, the expected battery life shall be at least a couple of years. Thus, a star topology would come in handy, because the controller could offload the exterior sensor significantly. The metallic structure of a car and the shape of some of its component hinder or modify wave propagation. For this reason, repeaters should be added, making the requirement of low power consumption harder to fulfill.

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2.4. The Industrial Environment Wireless sensor networks can be used in industries for observing and conservation of machines and finding of emergences, such as fire or any inception exceeding. In this case coverage area may be a limiting factor. A fully connected network can be achieved through a star topology and the use of repeaters, or through a hierarchical structure. In this second case the lowest level of the hierarchy is made up of sensors, collecting information about critical parameters in the environment and sending them to base stations, in the second level of the structure. The base stations then gather data proceeding from sensors elaborate them and send them to a central controller. This network topology is shown in Figure 4. III. SECURITY FRAMEWORK FOR WSN The framework for WSN is discussed in this section. Threats and attacks has been identified and analyzed together with some key security requirements. To be able to define the security policies and adaptive security framework for WSN some security issues have been identified. 3.1. Threats and Attacks Key threats in WSN are listed below. Sensor node compromise. By compromising a node, adversary can cause great deal to the network, creating false routing information, black hole, decreasing other nodes power, and others. Attacks from inside network is more difficult to handle than from outside, thus security algorithm has to have a mechanism to resolve compromised node and informed others of the malicious node.

threat can also be done by many layers, including jamming through physical layer. 3.2. Security Requirements Security requirements typical of a wide range of embedded systems have been detected. But it is the security model of each embedded system that will dictate the combination of requirements to apply. These typical security requirements are described in Table 1, and are presented from an end-user point of view. 3.3. Security Issues in Sensor Networks Sensor nodes have several constraints, involving battery power, rechargeability, sleep patterns, working memory, transmission range, tamper protection, time synchronization and unattended operation. There are several other constraints related to the network as well, such as ad hoc networking, limited pre-configuration, data rate and packet size, channel error rate, intermittent connectivity, latency and isolated subgroups. These constraints make it especially challenging to design security protocols for such networks. Common Security Requirements of WSNs Basic Security Functions: They denote the set of confidentiality, integrity and authentication requirements. The confidentiality goal is to prevent disclosure of information to unauthorized persons or systems. The integrity objective refers to preventing undetected modification of information by unauthorized persons or systems. Authentication is concerned with determination of the true identity of a system user. User identification: It refers to the process of validating users before allowing them to use the system. Secure network access: This provides a network connection or service access only if the device is authorized. Secure storage: This involves confidentiality and integrity of sensitive information stored in the system. Content security: Content security or Digital Rights Management (DRM) protects the rights of the digital content used in the system. Availability: Availability refers to ensuring that unauthorized persons or systems cannot deny access or use to authorized users. Tamper resistance: It refers to the desire to maintain these security requirements even when the device falls into the hands of malicious parties, and can be physically or logically probed. 3.3.1. Key Establishment and Trust Setup Public key cryptographic techniques are too expensive due to limited computational power. Key establishment techniques need to scale to hundreds or thousands of nodes. Communication patterns are different in sensor networkseach node may need to establish keys with its neighbors and data aggregation nodes. 3.3.2. Secrecy and Authentication Cryptographic hardware support increases cost, but improves computational efficiency. However it has been found that

Figure 3. Hierarchical Topology of a Sensor Network

Eavesdropping. Due to its wireless nature, an adversary can easily tapped in to wireless link and listens to conversation or sensed data to obtain information. Security should work well either in physical layer or upper layer. Privacy of sensed data. The future of sensor network explores the possibilities to be deployed among human surrounding and carrying much substantial information about peoples life. There should be some level of security upon this information, to limit access to certain information or to let it open to public. Denial of service attacks. The oldest and most common threat in network, it can consume other nodes power, since power is one of major constraint in sensor network. This

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cryptographic primitives implemented in software result in an overhead of only 510%, since they can overlap with transmission. Increase in packet size is the more important performance overhead. 3.3.3. Privacy Sensor networks allow malicious parties to spy on unaware victims. This results in new threats that can have troubling implications. 3.3.4. Denial of Service Sensor networks can be jammed by various means (such as emitting high energy signals, violating the MAC layer protocols, and so on). Jamming-resistant networks can identify the jammed area and route around it. 3.3.5. Secure Routing DoS attacks can be launched on the routing protocol, often preventing communication. Most routing protocols are susceptible to node capture attacks. 3.3.6. Resilience to Node Capture Tamper resistant packaging is expensive and does not provide a high level of security. State replication and checking redundant views for consistency are some ways of dealing with node capture (and compromise). 3.3.7. Secure Group Management Groups of nodes perform common tasks. Group membership can change dynamically and rapidly. Secure protocols for group management are required for adding and removing members, and authenticating data from groups of nodes. 3.3.8. Intrusion Detection It is necessary to clearly understand how co-operating adversaries can attack the system. Secure groups may be one solution for decentralized intrusion detection. 3.3.9. Secure Data Aggregation There may be many places in the sensor network where data aggregation takes place and all such locations should be secured. IV. PROPOSED SECURITY CONCEPT Adaptive Security Architecture In line with the security properties and different usage scenarios, the sensor nodes should support both basic and enhanced security modes, under the assumption that while in the home environment, e.g., little security is needed, whereas in the public environment settings might dictate higher security. These devices can be distinguished as trusted and non-trusted devices, with the implication that a trusted device has unrestricted access to all services. Three security modes are proposed for a non-trusted device. 4.1. Low Level Security Low level security networks provides non-privileged services and exchange non-sensitive data. These are generally small networks in the home environment for the remote control of domestic devices. All the networks for personal entertainment are included in this category, and they are generally made up of a reduced number of devices organized in a star topology.

In some cases it can be true that low data rate is synonym of low security. Specially, all the networks for personal entertainment are included in this category, and they are generally made up of a reduced number of devices organized in a star topology. As an example, network made up of a kids game console and a number of wireless joysticks. The only reason why some kind of authentication is necessary is that the console must have some means of distinguishing among different devices connected to it. An attacker to gain access to the service provided by the console would be an absurdity and excessively costly in relation with the benefit that the attack can bring. It is likely to assume that no attacks are performed on this kind of network. For this reason, an efficient authentication mechanism can be simply based on an access control list (ACL), which is basically a table containing the identities of trusted devices. Referring to the flow diagram depicted in Figure 5, when an entity A wants to access to a service provided by an entity B, it just has to communicate to B its identity. B will look up in its ACL whether this is present. If so, A is a trusted entity, and the access is granted, otherwise a reject message is returned. Bs ACL can be automatically updated every time that the console is switched on by means of an inquire routine, and no periodical update is needed when the network is operational. The only security measure that may be taken is at physical level, e.g., all the devices in the network can communicate with one another observing a frequency hopping sequence, established on the basis of the networks masters identity. Note that the principal goal of this mechanism is not to provide security, but to avoid interferences with other devices outside the network. Moreover, since the masters identity is not secret, also the hopping frequency can be predicted. Some kind of security is achieved in this way, since eavesdropping on messages exchanged in the network would require more than a simple receiver. Finally, coherently with the assumption that no attack is performed on the network, data freshness and data integrity are not issues to consider. It is worth noticing that the solutions adopted for the implementation of this security level minimize the required efforts to be carried out by networks devices. In particular: 1. Very low computational capability is required, since cryptography is not used. 2. The overhead is limited to the transmission of identities. Nevertheless, these are transmitted every time that the master is switched on. Little memory is required for the storage of ACL lists within the networks master, while slave devices do not have to store any security-associated information but the masters address. 4.2. Medium Level Security Medium level Security networks needs some kind of protection, even if the data exchanged within the network is not necessarily sensitive. The security provided in these cases is focused on authentication and authorization. This security level applies to networks, which can be object of active attacks, even if the data exchanged within the network cannot be considered highly sensitive, e.g.: 1. Small sensor networks in the home environment, 2. Large sensor networks (WINS) for the monitoring of some environmental condition over an extended territory. 3. Wireless PC peripherals such as printers, cameras, calculators, mobile phones, etc. This security level applies to all those WSNs, which can be object of active attacks, even if the data exchanged within the

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network cannot be considered highly sensitive. A large segment of WSNs are used to provide services in the home and in the automotive environment. In many of these cases, the assumption made in the previous subsection about the unlikely of attacks on the network can be still considered valid. On the other hand, it is also to be considered that an attack, for how much unlikely it can be, would produce not marginal consequences. A hacker gaining access on such a service would not certainly draw any benefit from that, because the only possible consequence would be the ability of regulating the temperature in the apartment. But what if his aim was purely destructive? A hacker might have the sole interest to bring damage to someone, undertaking the network and lowering/increasing the temperature in the apartment as much as possible. The necessary countermeasures, once the attack is successful, could be very expensive if the network did not implement any security. This same example suggests that the security function to be enhanced in this kind of networks is authentication. Since the data transferred over the network are not highly sensitive, confidentiality has a marginal role. The assumption can be made that in this kind of WSN services the access to the network must be protected more than the data exchanged within the network itself. Therefore, it can be concluded that medium security can be translated into reasonable authentication and confidentiality. Thus, the aim of this security level is not to provide an unbreakable protocol, but to render any attack costly to be performed. As for integrity, some considerations are needed. Some kind of integrity check must be done, but we have to pay attention to the overload that it implies and to the time needed to compute the check. Since packets are encrypted before transmission, the most likely forgery that can be imagined is a random change of bits in a packet. Once the two entities in a WSN have obtained a shared private key, the cryptography algorithm [3, 4] can be chosen according to the requirements of the particular network. RC5 algorithm is adopted in the security protocol, as it is most suited for WSNs with medium security requirements, due to the following reasons: 1. RC5 is fast, efficient, and implies low computational efforts, which is advisable for the scarcity of resources of the embedded processors in the network devices. 2. Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) uses over 10KB of lookup tables, and Data Encryption Standard (DES) requires a 512-entry S-Box table and a 256-entry table for various permutations. RC5, on the contrary, has small code size and does not require large tables. This feature finely matches with the reduced size of the memory in the network devices. 3. RC5 is extremely flexible. The used keys length ranges from 32 to 128 bits, and the block size from 0 to 2040 bits.

Figure 4. Access in WSNs with Low Security Requirements The values to be used can be established according to the exact security level required (for the key size) and to the average data rate (for the block size). Security Network Encryption Protocol (SNEP) [5] is a security protocol expressly studied for networks with heavy constraints upon devices characteristics. For this reason, it suits well to the WSNs introduced in the previous section, and especially to sensor networks. A sensor network can be seen as a set of base stations surrounded by clouds of nodes. The nodes establish a routing forest, with a base station as the root of every tree, and each node in a tree is capable of forwarding messages sent by other nodes to base stations. It is also possible to make the base station density in the network area so high that only direct communication between nodes and base stations needs to be implemented. This is evidently the case of WSNs in the home or in the automotive environment, where the distances among a base station (i.e., a central controller) and the nodes of the network is so reduced that message routing is trivial. Here, the simplicity of the networks topology allows us to consider feasible the assumption made in the previous section of a pre-shared master key between each node and its base station. The communication patterns in a WSN generally fall into three main categories: 1. Base station to one particular node, for specific requests. 2. Node to base station, for sensor reading. 3. Base station to all nodes (broadcast), for queries. SNEP is a protocol which aims at securing the first two kinds of patterns, providing confidentiality, authentication, integrity and weak freshness. For the third communication pattern, SNEP is not able to provide authentication anymore, and a new protocol is needed. In short, SNEP offers the following properties: 1. Authentication and Integrity, by means of the MAC. 2. Confidentiality and semantic security, thanks to RC5 encryption in CTR mode. 3. Weak freshness, by means of the sequential counter. 4. Replay protection, if the counter is used in message encryption. 5. Minimum communication overhead, being possible not to include the counter in the encryption when not necessary. 6. Low memory requirements, using the same block cipher for the encryption and authentication.

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4.3. High Level Security High level Security networks, which provide privileged access to service and/or exchange highly sensitive data. The provision of this security level implies heavy compromises with the network performance, such as in health monitoring applications. For example: smart card, which has all the personal information of an individual. Here very strong authentication and confidentiality is required. Also, established associations would be transient, which implies that the key exchange procedure should be carried out in some practical way. Finally, strong freshness would be necessary, in order to make it impossible for any reply attack. Lets consider a sensors network installed in a nuclear plant, controlling that a set of parameters remains under fixed thresholds. In order to design an efficient security protocol [68] for such a network, we should answer the question: To what extent should we accept trade-offs between security and cost? Examples of such applications are WSNs for home security or health monitoring. The fact that one can loose to some extent the requirement for a low cost network, in order to obtain higher security, does not allow us to disregard some other constraints. It is still very important to reduce the battery consumption as far as possible, for mere practical reasons. This implies that security functions must be fulfilled with minimum computational efforts and overhead. Authenticity is the main function to guarantee. That is true to some extent. In many other industrial applications, the fundamental requirement is that no untrusted entities are allowed to undertake the network, or inject false information into it; the information exchanged in the network cannot be considered highly confidential. This can be true also in health monitoring applications, such as a bypass controller communicating with a device held by the doctor, where it is essential that none but the doctor can have access to the functions provided by the patients bypass. For instance, a future scenario in which all the personal information of an individual, including the credit card number, is stored in a card with an embedded processor and a patch antenna for transmission. Such a card would be used for payment at every purchase, for which very strong authentication and confidentiality would be required. Also, established associations would be transient rather than long lasting, which implies that the key exchange procedure should be carried out in some practical way. Finally, strong freshness would be necessary, in order to make impossible any reply attack. The bootstrapping problem consists in providing two entities with secret keying material for a following secure communication. Once that this problem is solved, ensuring confidentiality is very easy: we just have to choose the cryptography algorithm that best matches our requirements. The most common criticism raised against identity-based schemes is that they do not provide revocation of users security capabilities, e.g., once a secret key has been issued to a user, the user can sign messages for an indefinite period of time, without the possibility of revoking this capability. A counterargument against this criticism is that there is a way to issue fine-grained time-dependent private keys using an identity-based scheme. This can be done issuing a private key corresponding to the users identity concatenated with some time-related information. This has the following consequences:

1. The digital signature is a guarantee of freshness. Even if it only provides very weak freshness, it can be sufficient for some kinds of applications. 2. If private key is corrupted, any consequence will last just one day. However, the main advantage of identity-based schemes is that they avoid the classical drawbacks of digital certificates reaching similar benefits. A CA-based solution requires transmission, storage, and verification of certificates. Even if this was technically possible in a WSN, assuming the continuous presence of a Certification Authority, it would surely not be advisable, for the evident implied cost in terms of battery consumption, overhead and memory requirements. Identity-based schemes avoid all these drawbacks, bringing great savings. The bootstrapping problem can be efficiently solved using two main ingredients: 1. A Diffie-Hellman key agreement, for the establishment of a shared symmetric key. 2. Identity based signatures, for authentication of messages during the Diffie-Hellman key agreement. The computational power required for this protocol is considerable, and the resulting efficiency will be subject of a close study. For the instant, just consider that the time to calculate a modular exponent is roughly proportional to the cube of the number of bits. So, the numbers for the Diffie-Hellman key exchange can be chosen according to the capability of the processors used and to the level of protection that the key agreement procedure needs, depending on the surrounding environment. Finally, the battery consumption due to this procedure could sound inviting for Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. As a countermeasure against such a threat, each entity can use a back off timer, increasing it exponentially each time that an authentication check fails. In some cases, then, when time constraints are loose, it is also possible to adopt the rule that the entity accepting a pairing request does not perform any operation before authenticating the other party. This same principle is used when client-puzzles are adopted against DoS attacks, but in case of WSN the solution of puzzles would imply further battery consumption in honest clients, which is definitely not desirable. The best suited algorithm to provide strong confidentiality is Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)-128. This is computationally heavier than RC5, used for medium security requirements, but undoubtedly stronger. On the other hand, AES-192 or AES-256 is excessively heavy. In fact, the very reason why they were defined was to not repeat the mistake done with Data encryption Standard (DES), which has a fixed-length key. With the increase of computational capabilities in the next years, AES-128 will be not sufficient anymore, and it will be replaced by AES-192, and later by AES-256. The operational mode that best copes with the described requirements is Counter with Cipher Block Chaining-Message Authentication Code (CCM) (Counter mode (CTR) + Cipher Block Chaining-Message Authentication Code (CBC-MAC)). It provides: Confidentiality and semantic security, through the use of nonces. Authenticity and Integrity, by means of the MAC.

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Weak freshness, by means of a counter. In cases where strong freshness is required (e.g., for synchronization functions), it can be achieved through the use of nonces. From this point of view, defining an adaptive security system would now seem a contradiction in terms, because it would imply to put all the defined levels together again. After all, we can observe that LDR devices, which have being broadly described for their constraints, are generally dedicated devices. This hypothesis is sufficient to convince us that it is useless to make them adaptive to diverse security needs. Still, we cannot ignore that, while these devices do not have to adapt themselves to the network, the network do need to adapt itself to the devices who dynamically take part into it. V. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE RESEARCH This paper has shown that there are still various tasks even with the most elementary security requirements a system may have. There is no hi-tech way of stopping a rightful user from perceptively abusing a security system and even helping the user to avoid unknowingly making security-related usage errors is challenging. The three defined levels of security allow covering the exigencies of every WSN service. The very reason why different security levels were defined is to find the right balance between two opposite tendencies. The first is to implement a high level of security, in order to provide the maximum protection to the transferred data, and the second is to give to security a secondary role, in order not to affect the performance of networks devices. The weakness of these solutions is that both of them are regardless of the services for which the network was set up. This work proposes a solution based on the required level of security and implements the encounter security needs with the minimum affliction for networks devices. Due to sensors restricted capabilities, there are a lot of design issues that must be more addressed to achieve an effective and efficient operation of wireless sensor networks. 5.1. Energy Saving Algorithms Since sensor nodes use batteries for power that are problematic to replace when consumed, it is critical to design algorithms and protocols in such a way to utilize minimal energy. To do so, implementers must reduce communication between sensor nodes, simplify computations and apply lightweight security solutions. 5.2. Location Discovery Many applications can tracking an object require knowing the exact or approximate physical location of a sensor node in order to link sensed data with the object under investigation. Furthermore, many topographical routing protocols need the location of sensor nodes to forward data among the network. Location discovery protocols must be designed in such a way that minimum information is needed to be exchanged among nodes to discover their location. Cost is another factor that influences design; manufacturers try to keep the cost at minimum levels since most sensor nodes are usually needed for many applications. If the cost is high, the adoption and spread of sensor technology will be prohibited.

5.3. Security Is it possible to introduce a new technology without addressing security? Of course not! However, as all other tools, security is not the top priority when designing something new. This approach is accredited by almost everyone, and it is inaccurate but they keep doing it anyway. Security results are constrained when applying them to sensor networks. For example, cryptography requires complex processing to provide encryption to the transferred data. Secure routing, secure discovery and verification of location, key establishment and trust setup, attacks against sensor nodes, secure group management and secure data aggregation are some of the many issues that need to be addressed in a security context. Future articles will analyze some of these issues to give you a good understanding of security related issues in wireless sensor networks. REFERENCES S. Schmidt, H. Krahn, S. Fischer, and D.Watjen, A Security Architecture for Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks, Security in Ad-hoc and Sensor Networks: First European Workshop (ESAS 2004) Heidelberg, Germany. Ed Callaway et al., Home Networking with 802.15.4: A Developing Standard for Low-Rate Wireless Personal Area Networks, IEEE Communication Magazine. F. Akyildiz, W. Su, Y. Sankarasubramaniam, and E. Cayirci, A Survey on Sensor Networks, IEEE Communications Magazine Perrig, R. Szewczyk, J.D. Tygar, V. Wen, and D.E Culler, SPINS: Security Protocols for Sensors Networks, Wireless Networks 8, Kluwer Academic Publishers. G. Frey and H.G. Ruck, The Tate Pairing and the Discrete Logarithm Applied to Elliptic Curve Cryptosystems, IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, Vol. 45, No. 5, 17171719. N.P. Smart, An Identity Based Authenticated key Agreement Protocol Based on theWeil Pairing, Electronics Letters. L. Chen and C.Kudla, Identity Based Authenticated Key Agreement Protocols from Pairings, HP Laboratories, Bristol

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BIOGRAPHY
Mr. K. Sivakumar is working as Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Hindusthan Institute of Technology Coimbatore. He has 14 Years of Teaching Experience in an Engineering College. First he started his career in KSRCT as a Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering from 1999. He is undergoing his research in the field of Computer Networks that too in Wireless Sensor Networks for Mobile Sampling of civilian Vehicles. Dr. T. Ravichandran is working as Principal at Hindusthan Institute of Technology Coimbatore. He has 18 years of teaching and research experience in an Engineering College. He completed his Doctorate in 2008 and guiding around 25 scholars in the field of Computer Networks, Image Processing and Mobile Computing in various technical universities. Dr. T. Ravichandran has published above 60 papers in International Journal. He is an active member of ISTE, IEEE and CSI Chapters.

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