Intrusion Detection Systems for Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are vulnerable to different types of security threats that can degrade the performance of the whole network; that might result in fatal problems like denial of service (DoS) attacks, routing attacks, Sybil attack etc. Key management protocols, authentication protocols and secure routing cannot provide security to WSNs for these types of attacks. Intrusion detection system (IDS) is a solution to this problem. It analyzes the network by collecting sufficient amount of data and detects abnormal behavior of sensor node(s). IDS based security mechanisms proposed for other network paradigms such as ad hoc networks, cannot directly be used in WSNs. Researchers have proposed various intrusion detection systems for wireless sensor networks during the last few years. We classify these approaches into three categories i.e. purely distributed, purely centralized and distributed-centralized. In this paper, we present a survey of these mechanisms. These schemes are further differentiated in the way they perform intrusion detection.