Attacks and Countermeasures on Routing Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

Abstract

Security in Wireless Sensor Networks has become one of the most relevant research topics. Designing a secure routing protocol in a wireless sensor network is a challenging task because of the limitations on memory, computational and communication capabilities, bandwidth and energy of the sensor nodes. Most of the routing protocols that were proposed were designed by keeping efficiency of energy in view but not security. Routing protocols in wireless sensor networks are susceptible to various types of attacks such as hello flood attack, Sybil attack, sink hole attack, worm hole attack, selective forwarding attack, avesdropping, acknowledgment spoofing, routing table overflow and so on. In this paper we discuss different types of attacks on routing protocols in detail and also some of the defensive techniques proposed in literature to counter the attacks.