ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an introduction to the specific security challenges in wireless sensor networks and some of the approaches to overcome them that have been proposed thus far. The following objectives are considered to be essential: “authenticity of communicating entities and messages, confidentiality, controlled access, availability of communication services, and non–repudiation of communication acts. The fundamental communication pattern to be used in wireless sensor network consists of an application demanding some named information in a specific geographical area. The transport layer, the threats “flooding” with connection requests and “desynchronization” of sequence numbers are identified. The main goal in the development of Sensor Network Encryption Protocol (SNEP) was the efficient realization of end–to–end security services for two–party communication. The SNEP protocol suite as describes includes a simple and rather traditional key management protocol that enables two sensor nodes to obtain a shared secret key with the help of a base station.
