Security and Privacy Challenges in Cognitive Wireless Sensor Networks
It tackles security and privacy challenges for CWSNs, which are crucial for reliable communication in critical applications, but the work is incremental as it reviews and categorizes existing issues without introducing new methods.
This chapter addresses security and privacy threats in cognitive wireless sensor networks (CWSNs), which are vulnerable due to their distributed nature and critical applications, by identifying various attacks and discussing defense mechanisms to counter these vulnerabilities.
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have attracted a lot of interest in the research community due to their potential applicability in a wide range of real-world practical applications. However, due to the distributed nature and their deployments in critical applications without human interventions and sensitivity and criticality of data communicated, these networks are vulnerable to numerous security and privacy threats that can adversely affect their performance. These issues become even more critical in cognitive wireless sensor networks (CWSNs) in which the sensor nodes have the capabilities of changing their transmission and reception parameters according to the radio environment under which they operate in order to achieve reliable and efficient communication and optimum utilization of the network resources. This chapter presents a comprehensive discussion on the security and privacy issues in CWSNs by identifying various security threats in these networks and various defense mechanisms to counter these vulnerabilities. Various types of attacks on CWSNs are categorized under different classes based on their natures and targets, and corresponding to each attack class, appropriate security mechanisms are also discussed. Some critical research issues on security and privacy in CWSNs are also identified.