Security in Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks – A Survey <s> V. OVERVIEW OF EXISTING SECURITY MECHANISMS <s> Recently, wireless sensor networks (WSN) have gained great popularity, mainly because they provide a low cost alternative to solving a great variety of real-world problems (Akyildiz, Su, & Sankarasubramaniam, 2003). Their low cost enableds the deployment of large amounts of sensor nodes (in the order of thousands, and in the future perhaps millions), which most of the time operate under harsh environments. WSN present extreme AbstrAct <s> BIB001 </s> Security in Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks – A Survey <s> V. OVERVIEW OF EXISTING SECURITY MECHANISMS <s> With sensor networks on the verge of deployment, security issues pertaining to the sensor networks are in the limelight. Though the security in sensor networks share many characteristics with wireless ad hoc networks, the two fields are rapidly diverging due to the fundamental differences between the make-up and goals of the two types of networks. Perhaps the greatest dividing difference is the energy and computational abilities. Sensor nodes are typically smaller, less powerful, and more prone to failure than nodes in an ad hoc network. These differences indicate that protocols that are valid in the context of ad-hoc networks may not be directly applicable for sensor networks. In this paper, we survey the state of art in securing wireless sensor networks. We review several protocols that provide security in sensor networks, with an emphasis on authentication, key management and distribution, secure routing, and methods for intrusion detection. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. <s> BIB002 </s> Security in Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks – A Survey <s> V. OVERVIEW OF EXISTING SECURITY MECHANISMS <s> As sensor networks are more and more being implemented in real world settings, it is necessary to analyze how the different requirements of these real-world applications can influence the security mechanisms. This paper offers both an overview and an analysis of the relationship between the different security threats, requirements, applications, and security technologies. Besides, it also overviews some of the existing sensor network standards, analyzing their security mechanisms. <s> BIB003
In this section, we introduce our taxonomy of security mechanisms for MWSNs. As shown in Table I , we classify and review the existing work on security of MWSNs based on security requirements of MWSNs. Generally speaking, there are more security requirements needed in MWSNs (as discussed in Section IV). However, since security requirements (integrity, availability, etc.) are also common requirements in WSNs, existing work BIB001 , BIB002 , BIB003 proposed for them can be used in MWSNs as well. Here, we discuss security issues unique to MWSNs that arise due to their dynamic network topology. In addition, due to an absence of literature addressing certain areas of security mechanisms, we also introduce some classic schemes in traditional WSNs as an alternative. 