Security Challenges in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Comprehensive Review
Keywords:
Machine Learning, Blockchain, Intrusion Detection, Cryptography, Security, IoT, WSN, Wireless Sensor NetworksAbstract
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have emerged as a fundamental technology for a wide range of applications, including environmental monitoring, healthcare, military surveillance, industrial automation, smart agriculture, and Internet of Things (IoT)-based systems. Despite their widespread adoption, WSNs remain highly vulnerable to security threats due to their limited computational capabilities, constrained energy resources, restricted memory, and deployment in unattended or hostile environments. These limitations make conventional security mechanisms unsuitable, necessitating the development of lightweight and energy-efficient security solutions. This review paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the major security challenges faced by WSNs, including physical node capture, denial-of-service (DoS), Sybil, sinkhole, wormhole, hello flood, blackhole, selective forwarding, replay, spoofing, and jamming attacks. The paper further discusses the fundamental security requirements of WSNs, such as confidentiality, integrity, authentication, availability, data freshness, secure localization, and access control. In addition, existing security mechanisms, including lightweight cryptographic techniques, key management schemes, secure routing protocols, trust management systems, and intrusion detection systems (IDS), are critically reviewed. The review concludes that achieving robust security in WSNs requires adaptive, lightweight, and intelligent security frameworks capable of balancing protection, computational complexity, and energy efficiency. The findings of this paper provide valuable insights for researchers and practitioners working toward the design of secure, scalable, and resilient wireless sensor networks.
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