A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF PHYSICAL ATTACKS ON WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

Rina Bhattacharya

Abstract: Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) have many potential applications and challenges They consists of hundreds or thousands of low power, low cost sensor nodes which have limited computing resources. WSNs are susceptible to many types of physical attacks due to wireless and shared nature of communication channel, un-trusted transmissions, deployment in open environments, unattended nature and limited resources. So security is a vital requirement for these networks. However wireless micro-sensor networks pose numerous design challenges. This challenge is especially difficult due to the energy constrained nature of the devices. In this paper we focus a wide variety of physical attacks and a comparison on them which enable s us to identify the purpose and capabilities of the attackers. Also this paper discusses known approaches of security detection and defensive mechanisms against the physical attacks effectively

Keywords: Communication channel, Open environment, Physical attacks, Sensor nodes, Wireless Sensor Networks,

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15623/ijret.2013.0201014