Abstract

WSNs perform an important role in many applications, such as battlefields surveillance, patient health monitoring, home automation, traffic control, environmental observation and building intrusion surveillance. WSNs are convenient, cost effective, and give ease of integration with other networks and their components. However, wireless technology also creates new threats. Since WSNs communicate by using radio frequencies therefore the risk of interference is more than with wired networks. If the message to be passed is not in an encrypted form, or is encrypted by using a weak algorithm, the attacker can read it, and it is the compromise to the confidentiality. Security objectives include: protecting confidentiality, assuring integrity, providing authentication and supporting availability of the information and information systems. In this paper we describe the types of existing security threats and how existing techniques can be used to prevent or mitigate these attacks in WSNs.

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